"The woman architect is an experiment, the working-out of which lies in the future, and time alone can show us the result," wrote Winifred Ryle, a British architect who was one of the first four women to be admitted to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1917. Back then, the potential of female architects was thought to be in designing homes with better-functioning kitchens and children's rooms, or perhaps childcare centers and nurseries.
A century later, the Iraqi-British "suparchitect" Zaha Hadid proved that even when faced with marginalization, it is possible to rise to the top and get extraordinary things built. By the time she received the female equivalent of a knighthood in 2012, she had already inspired a legion of female architects to take a wrecking ball to assumptions of gendered roles in construction and the built environment.
One of them was seated outside the S&S Corner Shop in Springs on a recent Sunday, sipping a latte.
Winka Dubbeldam is very Dutch. Six feet tall, full of adrenal energy and humor, she speaks four languages, uses terms like, "social housing," was a good friend of the late Dame Hadid, and is the founder of Archi-Tectonics, a New York City firm that recently completed its largest built commission to date: the Hangzhou Asian Games Park complex, a 116-acre development in China for the 2022 Asian Games, postponed until next year due to Covid. Oh, and Ms. Dubbeldam is also the chairwoman at the Weitzman School of Design's department of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
This was part two of the interview; the first happened a few weeks earlier in her Financial District office. There, several young protegees huddled around computers and Boy, her jaunty, golden doodle, pranced around while Ms. Dubbeldam flipped through "Strange Objects, New Solids, and Massive Things," a book she published earlier this year. It's a 350-page volume of manly heft, filled with details of monumental projects she has undertaken around the world, including the Asian Games complex. There's an apartment building here, a shopping mall there, sky-scraping towers, a wellness center, a townhouse covered in a moveable lattice skin -- all intimidatingly industrial-looking.
"I like technology and innovation and nonstandard things. So this whole book is about why we like to think nonstandard and push for the future. Well, you can see it here," she said, pointing to an 11-story building in SoHo, encased in glass. "This is actually double glazing that folds."
Umm, glass that folds?
Her eyes lit up. "I love breaking rules. I looked at the zoning code and this thing would have to be set back way more than it is. I figured out that if I used the zoning code, it translated to a kind of a slanted slope. So, I thought, interesting -- I can basically push the slanted slope through the straight part, and the straight part through the slanted part, and have one folded thing there, and what I give on the top, I would get back on the bottom, so I lost no space," she said, chuckling.
Clearly, a second meeting was in order. She weekends in Springs, where she bought "a small '60s cottage" in 2014 and was most impressed by the previous owner's architectural prowess when renovating the house in the 1990s. "I thought this woman was an architect but she wasn't, she was a sociologist or psychiatrist. She built a complete concrete basement under it, insulated all the walls properly, and put insulated windows everywhere. My house is good." Two years ago, Ms. Dubbledam installed a Tesla Solar Roof. "And I have a Tesla, so I drive on the sun," she said, happy to embody the ethos of her pioneering work, which is all about sustainable materials and smart building systems.
The idea of "being green" is now seen as a core aspirational value in the building industry. Corporations across the globe, civic authorities, and architects everywhere are keen to trumpet their eco-credentials, often rebranding their work as "environmentally responsible" and "sustainable." In that sense, some of these new developments might be said to be suffering from a form of "greenwashing" -- that is, the shallow and cynical appropriation of "green" values for commercial and political gain.
Ms. Dubbeldam shook her head. For her, green architecture isn't so much vegetation on a roof -- though she's prone to doing that -- as it is about enforcing better building standards and stricter regulations, such as those that exist in Europe.
"All these houses around here are not insulated properly. They're just [basic materials], paper, and sheet rock. And that's a house!" she exclaimed, clearly agitated by the flimsiness of East End building standards. She then pointed to the edges of the windows of the Springs' coffee shop and said, "Even these double-glazed windows are really badly made. The building standards in the U.S. would not be acceptable in Europe. We cannot keep doing this."
Nonetheless, Ms. Dubbeldam has not taken on projects on the East End as it would mean that her weekends would be all work. She cherishes a monk-like lifestyle when in Springs -- meditating, practicing yoga, seeing friends, and kayaking with Boy. "I like to kind of just reset on the weekends, because I do have two full-time jobs," she said.
She left Holland in the early 1990s with a master's degree from the Academy of Architecture in Rotterdam and moved to New York to study at Columbia University. "I was in search of architectural theory but also, I didn't like the work attitude in Holland. I love Holland. I love the social aspect. I love my friends. I don't like the work attitude of the Dutch. It's subtle, but it's there. It's this brutally honest thing that completely disregards any human feelings or any professionalism," she explained.
So, after working at several architectural firms in the city, she opened Archi-Tectonics in 1994 and soon became a vanguard for futuristic thinking. She has appeared on multiple "Women to Watch in Architecture" lists, received accolades for her innovative work, chaired many design juries, and launched her second career as a professor. In 2006, Archi-Tectonics was invited to participate in a competition sponsored by the History Channel, to design a 22nd-century "City of the Future," which was exhibited in Grand Central station. Her vision incorporated a series of small islands, where she addressed the city's, "garbage problems, harbor pollution problems . . . everything the city will need to think about in the next 25 to 5,000 years," including transportation powered by wave energy, a form of renewable energy harnessed from the motion of the waves. "We have amazing amounts of wave energy here. And wave energy is a hundred times more efficient. Actually, the whole of Roosevelt Island has wave energy, which no one ever talks about for some reason." Then, she smiled and rolled her eyes. "I was very far in the future and it freaked them out."
Which brought us to the elephant-in-the-room question: It's been 100 years since the modern architecture movement began, and still nobody really likes modern buildings. In fact, in a recent YouGov survey, 77 percent of people said they preferred traditional rather than contemporary buildings. So, are architects just people who build things that nobody else likes?
"You can't ask the general population in the U.S. because they haven't had beautiful modern buildings. People are confusing developer buildings that are paired down under the disguise of being modern but they're just badly built. I would love to do some good social housing here because what you guys make of it is really an insult to humanity. Social housing should be beautiful and as well built as anything else. And, you can do that for less money."
She paused, sipped her now-cold latte, then added, "I am definitely very Dutch. I'm very pragmatic. I can build things on budget within time. But I'm slightly more. I like to think of architecture as slightly more interesting, more intriguing, more complex, having character, identity, and beauty."
