ENSEMBLE CAST

How architect Anne Holtrop is leaving his mark on the Middle East

- MARWA EL MUBAR

Studio Anne Holtrop is a practice that revels in uncertainty. Having trained in, or experienced, a number of adjacent disciplines, from engineering to art and architecture, its founder, Dutch-born Anne Holtrop, set up shop in 2010 in Amsterdam, where he worked as an artist's assistant.

'Working in the arts gave me a sense of agency, a sense of being able to map out my own path. It gave me the courage to take up architecture as a practice,' he explains.

This freeing sense of flux is a theme that continues throughout his career.

Holtrop's early commissions came from associations made in the art world, including projects such as The Trail House, a 2010 art installation set on a vacant field in Almere, Netherlands, inspired by existing trails and paths across the site. Working on the piece presented a brief that was open and unconstrained in comparison to a typical architecture directive. As the standard architectural commission has a tendency to be conceived in a way that tackles the pragmatics of fulfilling building uses and client requirements, artistic work can feel fluid in comparison. This brought the design itself, its materiality and expression, into sharper focus. Paradoxically, Holtrop admits, this liberating feeling prompted deeper introspection, as each such project demanded the definition of a set of parameters and self-imposed constraints, to justify its existence.

'If no one is asking for anything, then the reasons need to come from yourself," he says.

He applied his self-reflection to the nature of architecture, too, exploring where its borders lie in relation to other creative disciplines.