Houben graduated cum laude from Delft and is the founding partner and creative director of Mecanoo, the Delft practice that grew out of a student team's winning entry for youth housing on Rotterdam's Kruisplein. Her range is deliberately wide — libraries above all, but also theatres, stations, housing, museums and hotels — and she describes her method as fusing architecture, urbanism and landscape and asks that a building appeal to all the senses rather than resolve into a single image. The library she completed at Delft University of Technology in 1997, a grass-covered slope pinned by a cone, made the practice's reputation and led to work in Britain, the United States and Taiwan. She directed the first International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in 2003.
