Claus en Kaan Architecten


Claus en Kaan Architecten was a Dutch architecture firm founded in 1987 by Felix Claus and Kees Kaan, led together with partners Vincent Panhuysen and Dikkie Scipio.

History

Claus was born in 1956 in Arnheim and Kaan was born in Breda, in 1961. They both graduated from Delft University of Technology in 1987.
They formed the firm of Claus en Kaan Architecten in 1987.
Claus en Kaan designed the master plan of the IJburg district of Amsterdam and later moved their offices to a building they designed in the district.
Kees Kaan and Felix Claus once stated that their ambition was to extinguish the schism between low practice and high theory, between architecture that serves its immediate objective and architecture that speaks over the heads of its users to colleagues and critics.
On January 15th of 2014 the company released a statement announcing the ending of the partnership between Claus and Kaan, effective January 1st, 2014. After such ending, Felix Claus started a partnership with Dick van Wageningen.

Notable works

In 2004 opened the Dutch Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. The building unites Dutch design and techniques with locally sourced materials and constraints, bringing the office spaces up to a European standard, whilst still taking into consideration history and the locality of the place. The Netherlands Architecture Institute publishers said of the building: "It is an exceptional building, designed to a Dutch vision yet constructed using African materials".
In 2008 Claus en Kaan completed a crematorium in the Belgian town of Sint-Niklaas, it won the 2009 Dutch National Concrete Award, the Betonprijs and was nominated for the ESCN award in 2010. Catherine Slessor, editor of the Architectural Review called it ‘a powerful statement, evoking timelessness, elementality and a connection with nature’.
The firm designed the House of Culture and Administration in Nijverdal.
It has also designed "social housing" projects in Ypenburg, at The Hague Vinex-location under the MVRDV masterplan. The firm has completed an "upscale collection of boxy units" named Rietvelden, after the "Dutch modernist master" Gerrit Rietveld, in a suburban development in Ypenburg.
The firm also designed Mövenpick's 408-room hotel tower that opened in 2007 in Amsterdam's harbor area. The hotel has "a 20-story exterior striped in alternating bands of glass, white concrete and green granite — not unlike an enormous Popsicle."

Selected works