The Berlage Sessions: On Assembly

Laura van Santen runs an independent architecture practice together with Diederik de Koning and currently teaches Interior Architecture at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She has collaborated with Petra Blaisse and Malkit Shoshan on various interiors and exhibitions, including the 2012 and 2016 entries for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Diederik de Koning graduated cum laude in architecture from the TU Delft, and also holds a master’s degree in Environmental and Infrastructure Planning from the University of Groningen. After having taught at The Berlage in Delft for close to three years, he now works for the Institut für Architektur und Landschaft at TU Graz. He has been a project coordinator and assistant curator for Architecture Workroom Brussels, on behalf of which, he worked on exhibitions in Rotterdam, Venice, and Istanbul. More recently, he worked as architect-researcher for the 2014 IABR Urban by Nature curated by Dirk Sijmons. His independent architecture practice, led together with Laura van Santen, completed a homestead in the east of the Netherlands, in 2015.

The Berlage Sessions, a seven-part seminar series entitled “Into Completion,” examines the chronological lives of buildings. From responding to a client’s brief and the postwar organization compared to the global expansion of large-scale architecture firms, to building optimization and construction detailing, the series explores the processes and components of realizing contemporary architecture.