Emptiness in architecture is a fundamental condition – just as pause makes music happen. The twenty-fourth episode of Stories of Contemporary Domesticity or HOMEland—a series curated by Archt. exploring the evolving interpretations of home through contemporary architectural practices—follows Rotterdam-based agence ontwerp, led by French architects Pauline Trochu and Mikaël Pors, through its debut project.
Revisiting 1960s modern heritage, the practice proposes a conceptual design approach that establishes emptiness as the primal condition through which space can be perceived and inhabited. Within a domestic ecosystem where expansive views of the city become part of everyday encounters, an eight-metre-long built-in plywood wall minimises the need for furniture, thus liberating space for architecture to be animated—allowing life to unfold.
Statenflat is one of Rotterdam’s characteristic post-war residential buildings and a textbook example of Dutch post-war Modernism. Designed by architect Harry Nefkens in 1958 as a twelve-storey mixed-use residential block functioning simultaneously as an urban landmark with panoramic views across Rotterdam, the building embodies the ideals of the Reconstruction period. Its long façade, articulated through repetitive modular bays and pronounced horizontal bands, reflects the principles of functional modernism by promoting industrialised construction, standardised housing modules, generous daylight, cross-ventilation, efficient circulation, restrained detailing, and an honest expression of structure.
By embracing the broader European shift that increasingly recognises buildings once dismissed as anonymous modernist slabs as valuable architectural heritage, agence ontwerp acknowledges Statenflat’s highly adaptable structural grid and the flexibility it offers for future domestic configurations—a remarkably forward-thinking quality for the late 1950s. By affirming the enduring intelligence of Nefkens’ original design, capable of accommodating radically different ways of living almost seventy years later, the renovation reveals its latent spatial potential: generous floor plates and double-aspect apartments animated by daylight entering from both façades.
“This building typology, where all apartments are double-sided, the load-bearing walls occur primarily between apartments, and the exterior façades remain largely non-structural, lends itself to great interior flexibility and therefore to freedom of layout,” explain the architects.
Working from a careful reading of the existing structure, agence ontwerp treats emptiness as an active architectural element in the redesign of this 90 m² apartment on Statenflat’s seventh floor.
Echoing Le Corbusier’s concept of the plan libre, in which structural independence liberates the interior as an open field of spatial possibilities (1929), the project’s defining gesture is an eight-metre-long mur utile: a usable plywood wall integrating storage, a work desk, bookshelves, and kitchen amenities. Behind its restrained timber surface, vivid ultramarine blue emerges as the cupboards are opened, while two built-in doors lead discreetly to the bedrooms and bathroom.
“Using the potential of the blank slate the building’s structure gave us, we redistributed the entire space, forcing one to walk greater distances within the apartment, making the space feel even larger. The expansive landscape is now part of the apartment, and the distant view is omnipresent as one moves through it,” recalls agence ontwerp.
Statenflat’s signature glass façade, framing unobstructed views across Rotterdam, becomes an inextricable part of domestic rituals, allowing the gaze to wander, momentarily dissolve into the landscape, and ultimately return home.
A restrained material vocabulary, reused joinery, and carefully selected moments of colour amplify the contemplative and sophisticated atmosphere of the overall design.
An exposed concrete ceiling and a continuous grey floor further intensify the project’s spatial economy, allowing the interval between things—what Japanese culture defines as ma (間)—to give form, rhythm and meaning to everyday life.
As German architect Günter Nitschke (1966) observed in his seminal essay on the Japanese sense of place, ma should not be understood as empty space but as a relational interval, an active condition emerging between bodies, objects, movement, and time. Similarly, the architects resist filling the apartment with objects, allowing ma to structure perception and domestic experience through moments of suspension and anticipation, activating a dynamic field continuously shaped by light, seasons, human presence, and ritual.
“Everyone needs a minimum of personal space, a place of privacy, calm, and balance. Whether we find our own anchor in a bedroom, a kitchen, or a living room, we need some empty space to truly settle in,” conclude Pauline and Mikaël.
Suspended between Rotterdam’s mist-veiled skyline and the intimate life unfolding indoors as the delicate counterbalance amidst walls, objects, bodies, and time, the Bentinckplein apartment renovation consciously addresses emptiness not as absence but as essence.
By recalling Le Corbusier’s conviction that free space is architecture’s true field of action, while reaffirming Nitschke’s understanding of ma as the experiential condition through which space acquires meaning, agence ontwerp creates a home that mediates the thresholds between inside and outside, private and public, permanence and change.
Mini Bio
agence ontwerp refers both to a stable entity [agence, the place where we conceive] and to a fluid process [ontwerp, meaning project or design]. It is as much a structure as it is a system. agence ontwerp was founded in 2025 in Rotterdam by Pauline Trochu and Mikaël Pors, French architects who have been living in the Netherlands for ten years. Drawing on the parallel and complementary experiences they have developed since graduating, they approach a wide range of programmes without preconceptions, from the smallest scale to the largest, through both built projects and research-based work.
From the renovation of everyday heritage to housing, from exploratory project-based research to city-making, they seek to build bridges between cultures, codes, and references. Rather than applying a fixed method, their aim is to develop spatial responses that achieve the greatest possible balance of restraint and generosity, through constructive rigour and a considered use of resources. The scope of their work is not confined to a single geography. Working across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, they draw inspiration from Europe as a whole, while always remaining attentive to the specific context of each site.
Pauline Trochu (1988) is architect (HMONP), graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Nantes in 2013. She has worked as a project leader at Bourbouze & Graindorge (Nantes), KAAN Architecten (Rotterdam), and for more than eight years at Atelier Kempe Thill.
Mikaël Pors (1988) is architect (HMONP), also graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Nantes in 2013. He has worked as a project architect at Louis Paillard and Bruther in Paris, at MVRDV in Rotterdam, and for more than seven years at Atelier Kempe Thill. He has also taught at Master’s level alongside Louis Paillard at the ENSA Nantes.
Bibliography
Le Corbusier (1929) The Complete Architectural Work.
Nitschke, G. (1966) ‘MA: The Japanese Sense of Place’, Architectural Design, 36(3), pp. 116–156.
Facts & Credits
Project title BENTINCK
Typology Stories of Contemporary Domesticity, Apartment Renovation, Residential
Episode 24th
Location Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Area 90m2
Status Completed, 2025
Architecture agence ontwerp
Photography Riccardo De Vecchi, Ruben Dario Kleimeer