Interview Jan Konings which the rooms and facilities are scattered throughout the Transvaal district in The Hague. What was your first impression of the area and how did you come up with the idea of creating a hotel? JK: My work is a combination of situations. On the one hand there are the proposals made by others; on the other hand I initiate projects myself and experiment with ideas I generate on my own. When I am asked to do a project, I try to combine it with one of the subjects I am tackling myself. For Hotel Transvaal, IÂ was invited by an art organization, which was located in the neighbourhood of Transvaal. During this period the neighbourhood underwent a huge transformation; 2000 dwellings had to be demolished, and 1600 had to be rebuilt. Because of this there were a lot of empty houses. The office of the art organization was in one of these old houses. They asked several designers, architects and artists to do something with the space. Initially
THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SOMEBODY AND THE OBJECT, BETWEEN SOMEBODY AND THE SPACE, AND BETWEEN SOMEBODY AND THE CITY OR THE LANDSCAPE IS REALLY IMPORTANT.
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INSIDE Architect
of testing ideas or models. An industrial designer is never finished with the first prototype. We have to see how the objects we create perform in the real world. Do people like it? What do they do with it? Sometimes people use things in different, unexpected ways. That is also the interesting part of it. In industrial design you include everything you see during these experiments. Architects have to make a building or create something that has to function in a certain way. If it does not fulfil these expectations and function as expected, it feels like a failure. But for me this is just the first step. That is why I think in interior architecture, we should test our designs in the real world. You build something to see the reaction of the users, so you can include this in your design. You can repeat the experiment, or other people can, and we should share the knowledge gained. KK: One of your projects that comes across in that sense is Hotel Transvaal. You created a hotel in