The 38-year-old Dutchman Anne Holtrop talks about his work with an artist’s sensibility, extracting form from existing, or completely random, conditions. He counts among his influences more artists than architects, and his first works were temporary structures, each within a museum context. That blurred line between art and architecture is one that Holtrop has been straddling his entire life.

As a child, Holtrop dreamed of going to art school, but his father encouraged him to pursue architecture instead. After completing four years at a technical school—where he “learned to construct things and calculate structures,” he says—he enrolled in the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. Though well-known in the Netherlands, the school doesn’t have quite the international reputation of the nearby Berlage Institute. “It was a very Dutch environment,” Holtrop recalls. Tutors included OMA partner Reinier de Graaf and the leader of the Dutch structuralist movement, Herman Hertzberger. Yet today, according to Holtrop, people are surprised to learn he is from the Netherlands when they see his architecture. “This makes me happy, because my work is a very personal investigation.”