INTERVIEW KRFT

The space choreographers

KRFT is an Amsterdam-based practice run by Thomas Dieben and Oscar Vos, built on an instinct for transformation over invention. Their projects treat existing sites—a crumbling military bunker, a seventeenth-century canal house, a centuries-old British campus—not as constraints but as source material, to be read closely before anything is added. Central to the studio's identity is a refusal to let restraint tip into caution. This surfaces most clearly in their Brighton College Performing Arts Centre, a building for teenagers learning to perform in public, where permanence and theatricality are treated as the same design problem.

Vuurtoreneiland, The Netherlands Photo: Christian van der Kooij

I sat down with Thomas Dieben and Oscar Vos during a heatwave. Despite the heat, their enthusiasm—matched only by their curiosity—nearly ran our conversation straight into their next meeting. Having just won a competition for a dance studio in Arnhem, there was a barely contained excitement in the air.

Movement and performance are recurring elements in their most recent work, including the Performing Arts Centre they designed for Brighton College in the UK. This project, completed two years ago, gave their careers a serious boost. They call it “choreography of space”; let’s find out more about it.

What type of office is KRFT?

Thomas Dieben: We’re extremely informal—the studio is more like a bunch of friends than a tight, strict design office. It’s an old factory, a great place to be: big space, workshop, machines for models and material tests on the ground floor. In summer everybody’s out on the street.

Do you feel that your approach to materials—lightweight but not superficial—is something particularly Dutch?

Oscar Vos: It’s interesting you frame it that way—Italy is actually a good reference point. For us it’s fundamentally about transformative architecture—not heritage in a preservationist sense, but thinking about places as they are, as they’ve been, and as they could become. That always comes down to physical reality. In a country like Italy, the existing fabric and its stories are the source of inspiration—the materiality, what can be reused, what potential a material has, how you can put it in a new light. That’s what keeps architecture from becoming superficial or artificial. Dieben: Especially for Dutch architects! We came after the Superdutch [the Dutch architecture movement that flourished in the 1990s and 2000s, characterised by dynamic forms, bold and easy to communicate]. It was all concept; narrative over form. Some brilliant experiments came out of it, but also some horrible detailing.

Vuurtoreneiland, The Netherlands Photos: Christian van der Kooij

We grew up needing to fight for the chance to build anything at all

Vos: It’s worth asking, looking back at that era: Did those narratives last? I’m not judging, but I think you can be quite critical of the added value that generation left for the longer history of architecture.

That’s partly what we’re reacting to, not consciously but as a generational condition: when the Superdutch flourished there was money. Assignments were almost thrown at young architects, tender rules were looser. We started during the financial crisis. We grew up needing to fight for the chance to build anything at all.

Dieben: So we’re extremely careful with the opportunities we get. Every time a site, a material, an assignment lands on our desk, we treat it with real respect—not out of extreme humility, we don’t mind intervening—but because we recognise the impact goes far beyond our own reach. It’s not about our story; it’s about what the building does to the site and the people around it, for far longer than we’ll be around.

Vos: So it is a form of humility, in a way—respecting what’s already there, recognising the value in what you choose to add, or not. That’s the beauty of the Vuurtoreneiland project [a former fortress island close to Amsterdam, part of UNESCO world heritage]: on that one, we were actually taught a lot by the client. We came in with the instinct that we needed to add something, make our mark—and the client kept pushing back: don’t do anything, back off. When we toured it for the ARC17 Awards, Nanne de Ru, one of the jurors, literally walked around asking, “So what did you guys actually do? Where’s your hand in this?”

Dieben: …the biggest compliment we could get!

Vos: Because to make that place function again as a reused site, we did an enormous amount of work—just none of it visible. Systemic, detailed restoration and transformation, layered in so it never competes with what’s already there. When we first arrived it felt like we’d found a hidden bunker—there was magic in the fact that it was rundown. Turn it into a museum and you’d lose exactly that.

Dieben: We made a new heated floor, we added a few pieces of furniture, now it’s a restaurant. You arrive by boat, and the whole experience is built around that sense of doing something slightly secret, having dinner inside an old fortress, and we wanted to keep that, so for instance, we oiled the existing metallic surfaces. We went as far as not replacing the mould-damaged window frames, just repairing them, keeping them exactly as found.

You perceive the oiled surfaces you mentioned precisely because the light is doing its job. Was light your hand? Vos: We did use light as a material itself, yes. You need very little to create a big contrast. And what about the relationship with the client, an ally rather than an obstacle? Vos: What we find interesting is that the most timeless architecture—military heritage, religious heritage, that kind—often doesn’t depend much on who the client was or why it was built. It shows a long-term purpose and an endless potential for reuse. Maybe the point is like parentage: the child must grow up, become an adult and change over time.

Dieben: It reminds me of our second project, De Appel, a contemporary art space in a 17th-century building in Amsterdam: both we and the client knew from the start that the tenant would only be there for a limited time. So we treated the whole interior as a parasite project: a bookstore built entirely from precast, CNC-milled elements that could be unbolted and moved elsewhere. When the tenant eventually relocated, the fit-out was dismantled and got a second life somewhere else. That’s the vision we always carry—looking backwards and forwards at the same time, aware that we’re just at one point on a longer timeline. Even our projects will be remodelled, transformed, maybe demolished. For us, history and sustainability are two sides of the same coin.

Vos: But there’s always tension in that. The urgency to be conscious of materials—not just for beauty or heritage but for the footprint—shouldn’t become an end in itself; a demountable building should not just prove that it’s demountable. Remember Stewart Brand’s layers of a building? Every layer needs a specific approach, but you must be realistic about the lifetime of a building.

The Brighton College Performing Arts Centre pushes the opposite instinct. In a sensitive, centuries-old urban context, a building that reads as a temporary, demountable object doesn’t make sense—the contrast is wrong. You start wanting to dance with that long history instead of fighting it: a skin and structure built for permanence, the way old cities were built. We did countless design studies, but at some point we felt the building needed to have that long-term presence—bold and strong and timeless. In its own way that’s still circular: you’re investing everything, with the client, into one very long-term intervention in the urban fabric, instead of hedging with impermanence. It can sound arrogant to call something a monument for the future—we try to stay humble toward the existing context—but sometimes real respect means adding something for the long-term.

De appel, amsterdam, the netherlands Photos: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk

How was it received by its community?

Dieben: This is a high school, kids aged 11 to 17, exactly the years when a personality turns into an identity. On our first campus tour, the headmaster told us their students were multi-talented—it sounded a little cocky at first, but it said a lot about the culture there. His point wasn’t bragging: they consider dance, drama and performance just as central to development as maths and science.

Vos: Very Renaissance, in a way; they see architecture as a means to let multi-talented kids flourish.

Dieben: On the same campus there’s a sports building by OMA, that has to pull you in and make sport feel exciting. We tried to do something similar: make the building intriguing enough that you want to be inside it, want to be part of whatever’s happening. We’ve seen a few student performances there now—you can feel how it draws in 14-16-year-olds, not just to perform but to build the production itself. It’s a student-run theatre, not a highly technical one—broad backstage galleries where they work as a team.

Vos: There’s a cultural layer to it too. Performing through language, standing up and speaking, is genuinely part of British debate education. They see it as training future public people and leaders—his words, not mine—and this building as a safe place to take that stand. Don’t be surprised by the rhetoric, it’s a private school; it stings a little to build this for the happy few, when you’d want every kid to have access to a place like this.

Dieben: They have at least opened it to the neighbourhood—it isn’t a public theatre, but it isn’t sealed off either.

Vos: I think it’s important to be open about that tension rather than avoid it—and to try to make the most of the scale and context we do get, for that generation of students.

Make the building intriguing enough that you want to be inside it, want to be part of whatever’s happening

On your website you call it “choreography of space,” what do you mean by that?

Dieben: There’s a real divide right now between ‘architecture as scenography’ and ‘architecture as choreography’. Every architect works in scenography—composing scenes, atmospheres, generating emotion by directing space, but choreography is different, because it brings in time, use, dynamics, thinking about transformation, about spaces holding multiple identities for multiple users. A journey through a building is never a straight line, nothing binary, it’s always a gradient.

Vos: It can look like we speak very deliberately about our own work, but a lot of it happens organically. 'A performing arts building has movement built into it’ was never our starting point; we do a lot of design research, real, hard-pushed work—and then, it’s a logical result you only recognise afterwards. Sometimes only after the building is delivered.

Pardon the strange comparison, but, Cristiano Ronaldo. Whatever you think of him, what’s remarkable about people like that is how completely they live inside what they do, how much more they invest than most of us register. I honestly believe good architecture works the same way…

Dieben: You can’t do it half-heartedly.

Vos: You have to fight for it, turn it over a hundred times. That’s why the office is called KRFT [kracht, power or strength] because we believe you need to put real power and presence into the work to make it function, or you shouldn’t be practicing at all. That sounds harsh, but you need full force, full attention, full intensity, or you don’t survive and you never reach a certain level. I genuinely believe it comes down to time, energy and effort more than talent.

This plea is an interesting connection back to where the interview started. The Superdutch era imposed a narrative so strong, it bordered on advertising: total synthesis, total bravado. That era is over. KRFT’s work runs in the opposite direction, building hyper-fast adaptations rather than hyper-strong impositions–adaptation to context, to culture, to a client’s ambition or means, through craft and constant study—yet, with the same intensity of the Superdutch. Ultimately, that’s what makes for good architecture.

Brighton College Performing Arts Centre, Brighton, United Kingdom Photos: Stijn Bollaert