Today is the opening of Sofia Architecture Week 09 and the opening lecture – Walter van Dijk architect and founding partner of NL architects; Amsterdam, Netherlands

NL Architects is an Amsterdam based office. The principals, Pieter Bannenberg, Walter van Dijk, Kamiel Klaasse, officially opened practice in January 1997.
Architecture is the medium through which we hope to contribute to the understanding of contemporary culture -and to its development. We understand architecture as the speculative process of investigating, revealing and reconfiguring the wonderful complexities of the world we live in. Can we compress banality into beauty; squeeze the sublime out of the obvious? How can we transform, twist, bend, stack or stretch, enhance or reduce, or reassemble the components that constitute our environment into new and better configurations? Often the projects focus on ordinary aspects of everyday life, including the unappreciated or negative, that are enhanced or twisted in order to bring to the fore the unexpected potential of the things that surround us. By sampling existing fragments of reality and recombining them, gluing bits and pieces together into new coherent arrangements, our architecture can be understood as The Remix of Reality: the architect as Deejay.