Four Walls and a Roof: Booking Signing with Author, Reinier de Graaf

This June, we will welcome Reinier to speak at reSITE 2018 ACCOMMODATE in Prague as we create dialogue surrounding housing and quality of life in cities. De Graaf is a partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), where he leads projects in Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He is also a co-founder of OMA’s think tank AMO and a visiting professor in Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

His recent built work includes the Timmerhuis, a mixed-use project in Rotterdam widely recognized for its innovation in ways of working and living, sustainability and cost efficiency; fashion brand G-Star Raw’s corporate and design headquarters in Amsterdam; and De Rotterdam, currently the largest building in the Netherlands. He is also the co-founder of OMA’s think tank AMO and a visiting professor in Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Architecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof challenges this notion, presenting a candid account of what it is really like to work as an architect.

Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from suburban New York to the rubble of northern Iraq, from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to garbage-strewn wastelands that represent the demolished hopes of postwar social housing. We meet oligarchs determined to translate ambitions into concrete and steel, developers for whom architecture is mere investment, and the layers of politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architectural idea and the chance of its execution.

Four Walls and a Roof tells the story of a profession buffeted by external forces that determine―at least as much as individual inspiration―what architects design. Perhaps the most important myth debunked is success itself. To achieve anything, architects must serve the powers they strive to critique, finding themselves in a perpetual conflict of interest. Together, architects, developers, politicians, and consultants form an improvised world of contest and compromise that none alone can control.