Architecture is the product of a combination of parties, of a process in which architects respond to their clients. Yet despite the attention paid to a few famed clients, like Truus Schröder, architecture is often examined and explained on the basis of the considerations of the architect, embodied in the object, and the ideas developed within the design discipline. This issue of OASE looks at the influence of the client on the way buildings or urban ensembles take shape. This is a historiographic revision: clients often prove to have creative impulses of their own, and their social views have had an impact on the evolution of architectonic cultures. The issue also includes conversations with clients who explicitly view their work as a contribution to the culture of building and the sustainable development of urban societies. In an era in which both clients and architects are compelled to reflect on their role and responsibility, a re-reading of architecture history from the perspective of the commission is more than necessary.

In 1929, Charles de Beistegui commissioned Le Corbusier to design an apartment in the Champs-Elysees. This essay minutely illustrates the high society milieu of the eccentric Beistegui and traces the artistic ambitions and highly personal agenda that directed his commissions. This essay describes the difficult process that resulted from the clash between an idiosyncratic and interfering patron and an egocentric architect as a form of autobiographical patronage. Van den Berg shows that Beistegui was always his own client, inclined towards the amateurism of the rich eighteenth-century gentleman-architects, trying to realize his very personal ideas that served to stage his public persona in a self-created décor de fête.

Niall Hobhouse is the sort of client who explicitly sets himself a cultural task. This is expressed in the way he manages Hadspen, a large estate in South West England his family has owned for generations. Hobhouse has invited architects such as Peter Smithson, Cedric Price, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Peter Zumthor to make creative contributions to the estate. He approaches these contributions as works in progress, in which the dialogue between client and architect is of utmost importance: as important as the result, as it were. Hobhouse has precise, clear-cut ideas and at the same time gives his architects a great deal of freedom. This article is based on parts of a correspondence between Hobhouse and British-based architects Florian Beigel and Philippe Christou of the Architecture Research Unit (ARU) as well as between author Christoph Grafe and Hobhouse.

Phyllis Lambert is best known for her instrumental role in the commissioning of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building and for founding and directing the Centre Canadien d’Architecture (CCA). This essay traces the wide variety of ways she has contributed to architectural culture, as a client, as an architect, a developer and as an activist, for example. All her initiatives were driven by her sense of responsibility as an architect, a motivation that stems from her understanding of architecture’s significance in the making of the city and of society. Rather than advancing her own interests, her diverse efforts have always been directed at enabling the creation of high-quality architecture, from a belief in its importance to (urban) culture and society. 

Following a period as a developer of housing projects, Klaus Hübotter has made a name for himself since the 1980s as a developer who formulates and implements inventive concepts for re-use projects in Germany and Eastern Europe. Re-use emerges as a choice of principle for him, inspired by an explicitly expressed vision of social developments and post-war urban planning. Hübotter, who has formulated his vision of building and development in a series of books, has received an impressive array of awards and honours for his contribution to the culture of building and for his cultural activism, and in in this issue of OASE he emerges as a model of highly socially and culturally engaged patronage.

Local politicians have long played a pivotal role in the construction of urban building devoted to culture,  and they also figure prominently in the post-war reconstruction campaigns in cities across Western Europe and in the realization of public buildings that invariably appeared in the new or re-built town centres. As national governments created the legal and financial frameworks of the welfare system, city councils and their leaders took the responsibility for concrete arrangements and for building schools, hospitals or housing. This article retraces the history of the post-war reconstruction of Stockholm’s inner city and the building of a new cultural centre through a study of Hjalmar Mehr, the most powerful Stockholm politician of the period and, arguably, one of the most effective local politicians in post-war Europe. In his various roles of councillor for social, financial and estate development, Mehr pressured his fellow Social Democrats to support the party line of a radical modernization of the city centre. The main public building that resulted from Mehr’s initiative, the Kulturhus, is described as the testament of a politician whose longing for a modern metropolis and a modern society played a crucial role in the radical reshaping of the landscape of a European capital. The building is shown to epitomize the agenda of the welfare state, based on Enlightenment thinking, acquiring an emblematic status for the new welfare city and a better, more just society.

This interview with Marcel Smets, the former Flemish Government Architect (2005–2010), elaborates on the recent turnabout of Belgium with regard to the attention for the public domain. Since the 1990s the growing self-confidence of Flanders has been paired with an emerging interest in the significance of architecture as a possible expression of the region’s unique culture. The publication of the Flanders Architecture Yearbook, the installation of the Flemish Government Architect and his team, and the establishment of the Flemish Architecture Institute all represent a recognition of the cultural and social relevance of contemporary architecture in Flanders. Smets reflects on the challenge he faced as Government Architect to turn the Flemish Government into an exemplary building commissioning entity, by taking policy preparation initiatives and fostering a broader architecture culture in Flanders.

Rudy Stroink is well-known because of the nature of his projects, which often address a political desire to create an environment for ‘creative and innovative businesses’. Through his company, TCN Properties, Rudy Stroink seeks new opportunities for urban development, in which the essence of collectiveness plays an important role. In Stroink’s view, the often difficult and murky relationships between client, government and architect result in long, drawn-out processes in the Netherlands. Although Stroink considers himself socially motivated in his projects, this interview mainly concerns itself with the management of the process and finding opportunities for implementing new developments and concepts. The role of the architect, and of architecture, is secondary.

Housing associations have deep roots in the Netherlands. Compared to neighbouring countries, their properties and the role they play in housing standards, urban climate, renewal and architectural quality of cities are considerable. In the 1980s and 1990s a change in attitude – from ideological to business-based – took place as a result of increasing scale and professionalism, and the associations began to operate more as commercial developers. The credit crisis is challenging their societal role once again, and the consequences of this are not yet known. Noud de Vreeze analyses and describes the underlying reasons for the changes within the associations in the past few decades, and explores what consequences these have for the role they assume in their projects, as well as what this means for spatial and urban quality.