Murphy: “Building for somewhere, not nowhere”

Charging a place. With buildings that express the context in which they stand. That is what architect Don Murphy of VMX Architects is currently focusing on when it comes to designing buildings and their facades. During ARCHITECT@WORK in Rotterdam, which in 2024 had Super Skin as its theme, he gave a lecture. Architectenweb asked him a number of questions about his approach.

“Isn't it great that every city and every neighbourhood has its own character”, Murphy says. “It ensures that when you take a selfie on Instagram, you can deduce where someone is: in a working-class Glasgow neighbourhood or a nineteenth-century one in The Hague. If you look closely, you can tell where someone is in such a photo.”

He describes the residential building Murphy and his team designed on Katendrecht, as a true Rotterdam docklands building. The buildings on Amsterdam's ‘Zuidas’ really fit into that environment. And as supervisor for the centre of Eindhoven, he encourages architects there to come up with references from the city of lights.

“When I see renderings of projects, I increasingly can't pinpoint where the project is located. Is it Utrecht? Nijmegen? It all looks alike. That can be traced back to the same calls for tender, the same building economy and the same building regulations. But this way, the individuality of places is lost”, Murphy believes. With his team, he has therefore in recent years started designing from context even more emphatically than before, to charge places through their designs. ‘Building for somewhere, not nowhere,’ he sums up.

Designing from the context

When designing ‘Haasje Over’ at Strijp-S, the bureau looked at the old Philips factory buildings: their composition, their storey heights, their materialisation, their spaciousness. The colour of Haasje Over is a nod to the colour of the roof tiles on the nearby social housing. “There is still some provocation in that”, Murphy admits, who above all is proud that it has become a building that could only have been implemented on that spot: “It is a building that fits there”.

At The Puls of Amsterdam on the Zuidas, the question was how to protect the dwellings from noise from the motorway and railway. Loggias work well then, which put the bureau on the track of the bay windows so typical of Amsterdam South. That's where the bureau got to work.

An office tower is part of The Puls, which VMX Architects designed together with MVSA Architects. “Because of its requirements, that automatically becomes a building from ‘nowhere’”, Murphy says, “it’s a building that could have been anywhere. Because that fits well with the international character of the Zuidas, the firm embraced that ‘nowhereness’ when designing the office tower.

The tower's forward-sloping glass facades have a commercial reason, he explains: the municipality calculates floor area by floor height, while in real estate it is measured at a metre height. So the forward-sloping facades yield slightly more lettable space. At every floor, the facade also tilts back and on those continuous hoods the PV panels could be integrated.

In the design for residential building Tic Tac Toe, a little further down the Zuidas, the sun played an even bigger role. “The building is like a sunflower turned towards the sun”, Murphy explains. The sloping facade sections in the project really face the sun so that PV panels could be concealed invisibly there.

At Tic Tac Toe, large windows bring lots of daylight into the flats, the large balconies are sometimes given large plants, there is a communal greenhouse on the roof of the residential tower, and the plinth of the building has large facade sections that can be opened, so that life there really flows from inside to outside and vice versa in summer.

The residential building designed by VMX Architects on the south side of Katendrecht has the scale of the factory buildings found here along the harbour basins on the quay. However, in the elaboration of the facade, the firm also refers to the design of ocean liners and to Maaskant's architecture. “Ultimately, I still associate Maaskant most with Rotterdam”, Murphy clarifies, “so we felt a touch of Maaskant was really appropriate here.”

Towards the heart of Katendrecht, the residential building is emphatically kept lower and connects different street profiles. In doing so, the building also forms two new squares that are an extension of two existing streets.

A window for a view, a window for ventilation

As with Haasje Over and The Puls, the residences in the residential building on Katendrecht have extra-large windows. “If you have this view, you want to be able to enjoy it”, emphasises Murphy, who doesn't understand anything about residential towers that end up with smaller windows anyway. In his own designs, he always prioritises those larger windows. Because that provides so much living quality. And it is sometimes a bit more complicated to make, he admits; on Katendrecht, that was a challenge for the builder too. “But it's really worth it”, Murphy looks back.

A large window to see through and a smaller window or hatch to ventilate. In VMX Architects' designs, those different functions of windows are usually disconnected. Because from that disconnection, the window to look outside can be made extra-large. The gigantic windows in Haasje Over at Strijp-S are a good example of this. The compact houses in that residential tower have been given extra storey height. Murphy and his team then managed to create a matching window to go with it. A deep windowsill makes it possible to sit in that window as well.

“It's a matter of setting clear priorities”, Murphy believes. “As an architect you can be charming, but at times also strict. And sometimes you also come to some kind of deal.” The client of Haasje Over at Strijp-S insisted on building a double storey above the covered skate hall, in order to achieve the Eindhoven layer, while Murphy preferred to make the aerial bridge to the roof gardens on top of buildings Anton and Gerard. Thereupon, they agreed that either both constructions would be realised or neither would. It became both.

Prefabrication

The facade of Haasje Over at Strijp-S is completely prefabricated. That is where we are heading, Murphy is convinced. Labour is very expensive, which is why many builders already prefer not to erect scaffolding around buildings. But the transition is slow, he also observes.

Later on, a power nest appeared on the roof of Haasje Over. This was not consulted with the architectural firm and Murphy regrets it. But it is also not something you can really be against, he thinks, because the energy transition is important, and he has to admit that he is starting to appreciate it. Many buildings in Eindhoven have imperfections, he thinks, and now Haasje Over has one too.

As supervisor, he now encourages the application of power nests to other buildings in Eindhoven. He philosophises that it would be interesting if such power nests appeared on buildings throughout Eindhoven, that it would become part of the Eindhoven identity. That following on from Philips and ASML, it could also be the city at the forefront of energy transition.