studio Donna van Milligen Bielke

Donna van Milligen Bielke is an architect who relies on the ‘collective pool of existing realized and unrealized architectures’, as Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston have called it in Make New History. This collective pool offers her an infinite reservoir of precedents, references, inspirations, allusions, and associations. In a similar way, it offers guidance for anyone writing about her architecture.

For Van Milligen Bielke architecture begins with architecture. And it ends with architecture as well. She uses the discipline’s history to kindle the fire of her own architecture. Even if she never mentions it explicitly, for Van Milligen Bielke, architecture suffices to make architecture. Instead of venturing into new and unfamiliar territories, borrowing from other disciplines or finding inspiration in fields outside architecture, she explores architecture itself, and offers re-readings of what is already there, reinterpretations of what has been done before, and recombinations of pre-existing elements.

Not all historical references have been direct inspirations for Van Milligen Bielke, but if nothing else, they show that her strategies and approaches are grounded in the history of the discipline, that for everything she does there are references, just as whoever speaks a language, is speaking the language of their predecessors. Even if you only know a few thousands words in a particular language, even if you have no idea of the etymological origins of these words, every single one of them stands in relation with a language’s complete vocabulary, and its history.

A language is based on all its words, including the ones that are rarely used, or almost nobody knows.  In the same way, wittingly or unwittingly, every architect stand in relation to all architecture that has ever been made. Not every architect is fully acknowledging this, but van Milligen Bielke does so, and in her work it is possible to see the depth of the discipline and its history.

van Milligen Bielke sees the world around us as a giant carpet, woven by countless designers. As an architect, she attempts to unravel this carpet’s structure, to interpret its densities, colours, and textures, and subsequently adds new motifs, repairs its tissue where needed, and artfully finishes its frayed edges. She finds inspiration in the stories contained in cities and landscapes, and can spend hours on Google Earth, wondering about the spaces and patterns which nature and humans have formed on the surface of the Earth and absorbs the images she encounters, whether it is a cochlea, a traffic junction, the extreme density of Kowloon in Hong Kong or the ‘inverted’ map of Rome  by Giambattista Nolli, showing not only streets and squares, but also the publicly accessible space within buildings, as public space.

Van Milligen Bielke professes her work in the knowledge that architecture never exists in isolation. As the threads of a carpet make a pattern, buildings make the streets and squares, becoming part of ever-expanding and ever-changing cities. Existing structures can be reused or transformed; old materials and stories are adapted to new buildings to become part of the urban tissue. Van Milligen Bielke’s designs are the outcome of a personal fascination ‘to define the space at the border of architecture and the city.’
She understands that city building is not only a matter of continuity, but also of change.