GG van der Berg

Maarten van der Berg trained as an architect at TU Delft and spent his late twenties on small public buildings: a library in Almere, two schoolyards in Groningen. At thirty-three he concluded that architecture was not going to make him happy and this might. Two Dutch national titles, a top-sixteen at Monaco in his first professional year, a Dutch-language channel, and a houseboat near Westerpark. The architecture sketchbook still travels in his bag.

He builds pressure the way a wall carries load: nothing visible for a long time, and then all of it at once. There is no middle game in his matches. He is either three moves from finishing you or already finished, and he prefers the second outcome to a long grind he might still win.