Professor Kas Oosterhuis is a visionary, practicing architect, founding director of the innovation studio ONL, and founding professor of the Hyperbody research group at TU Delft from 2000 to 2016. Environments at all scales - from furniture to buildings to cities - are considered complex adaptive systems, in terms of their complex geometry and their behavior in time. The main focus of the current practice is on parametric design, robotic building, and AI in all phases of the design to production and the design to operation process. Featured projects the A2 COCKPIT building in Utrecht, the BÁLNA mixed-use cultural center in Budapest, the LIWA tower in Abu Dhabi, and the individually customizable BODY CHAIR are living proof of Oosterhuis' lean design-to-production approach, in terms of precision, assembly, sustainability, costs, and design signature. Oosterhuis' built projects are characterized by a strong component-based integration of structure, skin, and ornamentation, paving the way for the affordable iconic. In his previous book Towards a New Kind of Building, a Designer's Guide to Nonstandard Architecture, Oosterhuis revealed the fundamentals of his personal design universe, which embraces the paradigm shift from standard to nonstandard architecture and from static to dynamic environments as the initial condition. In this book, The Component, Oosterhuis dives deeper into the role of the components that interact to form bespoke designs.
