Powerhouse Company

This talk will be held in English / Bu etkinlik İngilizce’dir.

Response by Alexis Şanal.

Conscious of the gap between high and low culture, theory and design the Powerhouse Company neither only wants to build, nor just to theorize on the reasons for a new architecture, but instead bring back architecture as an encompassing, constructive and innovative practice. Powerhouse Company aims at re-locating the practice of architecture at the cross-roads between design, research and education.

“We are an office of modern architecture and paradoxically that sounds old-fashioned. After all wasn’t the modernist agenda about making things better for everyone? Back then the question was how to provide everyone with light, air and space. But today the questions are no-longer single sided. Now, design can be on the one hand a question of ceiling integrated video beamers, rain-forest showers and play-station rooms – yet it can also be a question of designing hooligan-proof public space that gives place to our culturally rich modern society. For us, these times ask for both exclusive and inclusive designs: specific buildings and objects that embrace the richness of reality and charge their contexts with new means and meanings.”

Powerhouse Company is a international architectural practice established in Copenhagen (DK) and Rotterdam (NL). The office was founded in 2005 by two partners: Charles Bessard in Denmark and Nanne de Ru in Holland. Both partners have forged their experience and skills in internationally renowned practices such as Atelier Jean Nouvel and OMA Rem Koolhaas. Powerhouse Company is a medium sized office developing an international profile with projects in Denmark, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Cyprus and China.

The work of Powerhouse Company has been exhibited at the Guggenheim museum in New York, the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York, the Maxxi in Rome and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam as well as various biennales such as the 2005 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, the 2010 Shenzen Bienale and the 8th Sao Paulo Biennale of Architecture. Projects and texts of Powerhouse Company have been published in various magazines such as Domus, A+U, Mark Magazine, A10 and The New York Times.

Powerhouse Company has been awarded several prizes over the last 7 years.In 2012 we received Nykredit the motivation price in Copenhagen. In 2008 Powerhouse Company has been awarded the Dutch Design Award 2008 for the category ‘best private interior design’, the AM/NAi prize for the best building by architects under 40 and the Prix Speciale for best office of Ecole Superieur d’Architecture in Paris. The office was shortlisted for the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award 2009 and 2011, the Chernikov prize 2010 and the Marcus Prize of Milwaukee University, USA. In 2011 Powerhouse Company was awarded the Young Maaskantprijs.

Powerhouse Company have published several books, latest in 2012 ‘SHIFTS – Architecture after the 20th century’ with Hans Ibelings – A polemical book illustrating the far-reaching impacts of new economic circumstances on architecture’s past, present and future. In 2011 we published ‘Ouvertures – The First Six Years of Powerhouse Company’

Free and open to public.