Litigating architects

Litigating architects: a real trend. Take architect Fons Verheijen, for instance, who fought the renovation of ‘his’ Naturalis in court for two years. In a remarkable interim ruling the judge found that the renovation, necessary to accommodate the growth in visitor numbers, infringed the architect’s moral rights. These are the rights an author enjoys to protect his reputation. One of them is the right to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of the work that would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation. The judge also announced that in her final judgment she would address the consequences of that finding for the renovation. In the meantime, Naturalis happily kept on renovating.

Verheijen saw the writing on the wall and foresaw his building being ruined by the time the judge ruled on the renovation. To head that off, he brought fresh proceedings, this time interim injunction proceedings. The judge ruled in Verheijen’s favour and prohibited Naturalis from renovating while the final judgment was still pending. Tough for Naturalis, which said there was a very real chance that the ban on renovating would bankrupt it. To avoid that, Naturalis and Verheijen reached a settlement, and it cost Naturalis dearly. For €1.5 million Verheijen could live with his building being tampered with. He said he would put the money into a foundation he had yet to set up, which would promote academic research into architecture. Naturalis would also set up a virtual museum where Verheijen’s Naturalis could still be admired by the public. All’s well that ends well.

The architects’ firm Alberts & Van Huut was less successful. They went to court (there is that trend again) to fight the partial demolition of the office park ‘De Bovenlanden’ in Amstelveen (the former KPMG building), which they had designed. A German investment firm wanted to turn the immense office building into luxury apartments. To make that possible, the façade was to be altered, among other things. Here too the architects invoked their moral rights.

Looking at the conversion plans, the architects said, those rights were plainly being infringed. Whereas their building was an example of “organic architecture, where connection to the earth was an important notion” and thus “part of nature”, in the new design “the architecture is understood as contrasting to nature”. The judge disagreed. He found that this was not a renovation but total destruction. And for that, different rules apply. The case law holds that the complete destruction of a building is not a distortion of the design, so an architect cannot simply invoke moral rights. And that is exactly where this case differs from Naturalis: there, not enough was being destroyed to count as total destruction.

So, sadly for our KPMG architects, the Germans were more radical, and invoking their moral rights did not help.

This blog was written by Jaap Versteeg and Merel Teunissen