REGISTER - JOB FLORIS (MONADNOCK)

In this episode Andrew Clancy interviews Job Floris, a partner with Sandor Naus in Monadnock Architects, a practice based in Rotterdam. Their buildings possesses a formal intensity which is leavened with careful attention to their materiality. Their buildings sit at ease with their place in the living tradition of European architecture and yet speak of our current time, and the ambiguities of contemporary tectonics. In their practice the history of architecture is seen as a place for invention, a place to dream using the tools of our age. Their buildings possess the same peculiar familiarity of their drawings, a sense of something seen before and yet entirely new. A sense of delicacy and simultaneous formal heft.

This takes great skill and careful balance which can be easily overlooked. If we examine how for example they treat brickwork in two projects (Atlas and Nieuw Bergen) we see in one (Atlas) how the joints are manipulated to offset the purity of the skin, giving a textural reading which changes in our relationship with the building while in the other the entire surface of the brick is treated to allow this civic structure read almost as a theatrical stage set to the town it addresses. The detail and the whole are set in a careful dance from which the overall character of the building emerges.

In this conversation we try to capture the breadth of Jobs interests and background, and the forces which have informed how he and his practice think about architecture.

Job teaches in Rotterdam, where he co-ordinates the Masters of Architecture there.

http://monadnock.nl/en

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Credits:
Register is brought to you by the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London
https://www.kingston.ac.uk/faculties/kingston-school-of-art/study/architecture-and-landscape/

Head of Department: Eleanor Suess
Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy
Interviewer: Andrew Clancy
Audio: Madoka Ellis