This Way Up

OMA's Ellen van loon on her architectural ascent, embracing the impossible, and boxing clever on Copenhagen’s harbourfront

For most architects, leaving university means kissing the crazy ideas and impossible designs goodbye and buckling down to pragmatism and compromise; not for Ellen van Loon. The Dutch architect, a partner at Rem Koolhaas’ OMA since 2002, approaches her projects with the same ambition, uncompromising passion and conceptual rigour she had when she was a student back at TU Delft. And what’s more, she is extremely adept at bringing those ‘crazy’ projects to life. Following a strong concept is at the core of van Loon’s work, a quality that makes her buildings both very easy to explain, but also, often, pretty challenging to actually build.

‘I have always been driven by concepts; things like mood boards and styles came much later for me,’ she says, sitting in a nondescript Rotterdam café, having come straight from a seven-hour meeting in The Hague about the Dutch parliament renovation that she is working on there. Anyone else would probably be nursing a throbbing headache at this point, but van Loon seems completely unaffected, full of energy and happily reminisces about her university days.

‘My initial drive is the conceptual take on a project,’ she explains. ‘I was always in the model shop of the university, trying to find new shapes, new ways of organising buildings. I remember a moment in my studies when Rem gave a lecture about the library in Paris [Très Grande Bibliothèque, OMA’s competition entry for a new national library] and I was totally flabbergasted. I remember thinking this was the first architect I’d met that could really think conceptually.’