Studio Anne Holtrop. 2G / #73

Until very recently, the young Dutch architect Anne Holtrop had only built a few small pavilions and various installations between art and architecture. Outside of conventional architectural circuit, and more related to the art installations, these extremely poetic pavilions consisted of small-scale spatial concepts and personal research on materials. However, the work of Holtrop took a leap of scale with two projects finished in 2015: the Museum Fort Vechten in Bunnik (near Utrecht, The Netherlands) and the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain for the Milan Universal Exhibition of 2015. The former, a museum built within the enclosure of the New Hollandic Water Line fortifications, dug into the ground to create dark concrete walled galleries opening onto a courtyard artificial. The second, the National Pavilion of Bahrain is enclosed by a tall concrete wall that contains an interior maze of galleries, corridors and gardens.