by Claudio Camponogara

Maurice Nio, Emanuela Guerrucci, Edilstampa, Roma 2006 (pp. 128, € 22,00)

For some years now, Dutch architecture has been a favourite observational focus of the foreign critics after putting itself forward as a potential workshop for the urban changes that have radically affected the social and physical set up of the European continent since the 1980s. Pragmatism, experimentalism, radicalism and utopia feature in the work of the Dutch architects, who have given rise to astounding, uncommon and original architecture that generates urban quality.

Now, after the talented generation of Koolhaas, Van Berkel, Mecanoo and MVRDV, now considered masters, we see new protagonists appearing. This is the case of Maurice Nio, one of the most interesting figures on today’s Dutch architectural scene. In 1990, he and Lars Spuybroek founded Nox, which initially stood as a fairly traditional architectural practice, a firm specialised in several media, including architecture. Among other things, the group produced the fine magazine Nox, which gave rise to installations and articles, samplers, cybers, hackers and video clips, passing easily from one medium to another.

This constant variety of experiences prompted a delightful miscellany of images and styles, unexpected and seductive metamorphoses that were radically provocative. The relationship between man, nature and technology constituted the core theme of the Nox projects; technology not merely as a tool serving man but totally taking control of him and pursuing its own mysterious ends. The manipulations developed by the computer found in the Biotec issue of Nox Magazine clearly translate this concern: a school of leaping dolphins joins a fighter-plane squadron and their union produces a mutant race. Nio’s architecture thus appears as a fatal Baudrillard-type strategy but, despite the dominance of technology, Nio does not despair of saving man from what Paul Virilio calls polar inertia.

The Nox experience was the first act in new experimentation and research where the architecture served as a medium and became a backup to the computer. But the creation of his own professional practice in 2000, Nio Architecten, marked the beginning of a renewed exchange with reality.

As stressed by Emanuela Guerrucci in the foreword, the projects by the Nio practice are distinguished by a self-referential sculptural form, a disquieting presence on the landscape, blob-like masses produced with the use of complex software and the most diverse and sophisticated materials. This permits the creation of a surroundable architectural space that does not disintegrate into the surrounding environment in search of a physical continuity between interior and exterior, but declares its foreignness. The space hides the secret that drives the project and that is often hard to guess. The creative process is not something obscure but something that lends shape, as clear-mindedly as possible, to the mystery, the ambiguity and the reversible.

In his disquieting projects, Nio, an early scholar of Baudrillard, places signs on the frontier zones of the contemporary human condition, an imprint, a lucid presence that seeks to fix at least a moment of that modern liquidity that Barman spoke of in surreal form. Nio manages to find an unsuspected and unforeseen soul in these non-places, but a soul nevertheless.

As well as a detailed and re-elaborated series of some of the architect’s creations, Emanuela Guerrucci’s book Maurice Nio also offers a charming and scarcely academic interview plus five written pieces, each retracing a project in an attempt to provide the key to his works. All the language used is a fascinating, fabulous and philosophical pastiche rather than the expression of an architect in the traditional sense of the word. This is an example of Nio’s efforts to blend many arts in every single work: writing, cinema and technology in a successful attempt to contaminate the architecture and breathe new life back into it.

“This is my dream,” as Nio says in one of the book’s essays, “to contaminate the soft with the hard, the hazy with the crystal clear, the virtual with the real and the sharp with the blunt.” This book begs to be read as an inexhaustible and promising dialogue between architecture and technique, between past, present and future. This will fully bring out the path of Maurice Nio and his unexpected and desecrating but never banal or “deja vu” presence in the harsh contemporary urban reality.

Claudio Camponogara
Architect