MEET THE SPEAKER\\ Armand Paardekooper Overman, Associate Partner MECANOO, The Netherlands

People, Place, Purpose, Poetry — the Pillars of MECANOO

Armand Paardekooper Overman, Associate Partner MECANOO, will bring a valuable contribution at SHARE Cyprus 2024, presenting the way their practice understands and responds to the current architectural context.

 

 

Armand Paardekooper Overman is Associate Partner at MECANOO and has joined the team of the multi-oriented practice in 2018. He believes in the fruitful open dialogue between the different actors involved in architecture and urbanism projects, enjoying the diverse contributions accumulated from working with universities, start-ups, economists, politicians, entrepreneurs and residents. This type of constructive communication is, in his opinion, an important factor in building inventive, complex, socially responsible and widely appreciated projects, which come as thoughtful responses to the many challenges of today’s world.

The broadness of implication from consultants and clients is seen as a meaningful participation to the creative collective intelligence. Investigating, discovering, doing business, closely discussing with external collaborators, consultants and clients enriches the design process with ideas clearly anchored in the necessities coming out of the present dynamic context. Thus the projects “grow” through interaction and the combination of knowledge and expertise, according to Armand Paardekooper Overman. This approach of his has been collected and applied through an extensive corpus of experience. Among many other contributions, he is a founding partner of fUSE Architecture and founder of the real estate development company Urban Sync. He has a significant expertise in realising spatial quality within the context of complex multi-stakeholder processes, including the Cartesiusdriehoek development in Utrecht and Eden Soestdijk.

Apart from this, Armand Paardekooper Overman plays a pivotal role in Mecanoo’s research team MEC-LAB, focusing on sustainability. He stresses out that architecture and spatial design have a great power in modelling a better future and offer great value to our lives, trying through his implication at MECANOO to concretise all these ideas.

 

 

MECANOO are preoccupied by the many problematics of the present architectural field and strive to always include sustainability as a built-in principle of their design approach, feeding into an ambition to create new identity in a world of globalisation, resulting in inspiring and authentic places, socially relevant for people and communities.

They have constructed their discourse, philosophy and position on four main pillars People, Place, Purpose, Poetry: “to the client’s requirements and the user’s needs (People); the physical context, climate and culture (Place); and the current and predicted potential of a building’s function (Purpose), creating designs that touches all the senses (Poetry)”.

MECANOO is deeply dedicated to understanding and responding to the macro-scale context of climate change, ceaseless urbanisation, the digitisation of systems, knowledge and life, global shifts in power, population and wealth, but at the same time their focus remains to the human scale. They provide solutions that are significant for people, for communities and for certain places. From zoom out to zoom in projects, their design gestures remain consistent and faithful to their declared values.