SUMMERHOUSE

House extension

Location: Ghent, BE
Year: 2004–2007
Budget: EUR 150 000
Surface: 170 m²

The expansion of a 19th century town house in the heart of Ghent resulted in two houses. In the irregular outdoor space alongside the existing ‘winter house’ a ‘summer house’ was marked out by a precise modular frame of steel sections, overgrown with grapevines . A narrow strip of this frame, right against the winter house, was roofed with steel grilles which rest on six thin fins of polished steel. Enclosed by sliding panels of single glass, an intermediate climate prevails in this roofed section. In the remaining spaces between the frame and the garden wall a garden storage shed, an outdoor kitchen and space for storing firewood are to be found. By placing a number of mirrored glass doors in the corners of the perimeter, the winter house ‘disappears’ once the summer house is entered.

This house offers a new interpretation for the typical outbuilding, making it into a new, independent universe, precisely by the visual experience of detaching the new house from the original house. The various layers from which the summer house is constructed – the steel frame, the climbing vines, the glass doors – absorb the slow passage of the seasons.

BORDER GARDEN

Location: Mexico / United States
Year: 2005

International competition, 1st prize, i.c.w. Wonne Ickx

An oblong volume provides a border crossing for pedestrians between Mexico and the US, and interrupts the endless demarcated boundary. A nine-metre high wall defines a no-man’s-land between the two countries. Within the white walls a grid of palm trees imposes order on a large, shaded garden. Pavilions for passport control and administration are spread around here and there, becoming part of the garden. The oasis is a point of reference in the vast Tex-Mex landscape, hidden within the open landscape by its walls. In all its simplicity it raises questions about the desire for the promised land.

A GRAMMAR FOR THE CITY

Design of a new Administrative Capital of South-Korea

Location: South-Korea
Year: 2005

International competition, 1st prize
In collaboration with Dogma

This city, designed for 500,000 residents, is organised as a sequence of rooms that are formed by ‘city walls’. The city walls are a composition of cruciform buildings that represent two-thirds of the built mass of the city. These ‘walls’ form the habitable architectonic structure of the city. The spaces between the city walls are rooms without content, providing the space for further urban development. The future content is the furniture of the rooms, as it were. The plan seeks to define the form of the city in a rigid manner, without lapsing into the naïve modernistic ideal of the city as a fixed, predetermined organisation of buildings. The city walls and city rooms form the ‘genesis’ of the city, its bare facts. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.

This city, designed for 500,000 residents, is organised as a sequence of rooms that are formed by ‘city walls’. The city walls are a composition of cruciform buildings that represent two-thirds of the built mass of the city. These ‘walls’ form the habitable architectonic structure of the city. The spaces between the city walls are rooms without content, providing the space for further urban development. The future content is the furniture of the rooms, as it were. The plan seeks to define the form of the city in a rigid manner, without lapsing into the naïve modernistic ideal of the city as a fixed, predetermined organisation of buildings. The city walls and city rooms form the ‘genesis’ of the city, its bare facts. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.

BRIDGE

Bridge for the Handelsbeurs
In collaboration with Util Structuurstudies

Location: Ghent, BE
Time: 2006–2008
Budget: EUR 550 000
Surface: 120 m²

Winner of the Belgian Building Award 2008, category Public Space

More than simply a connection from A to B, this bridge, located in the center of Ghent, connects the bank of the Ketelvest canal with the terrace behind the Handelsbeurs concert hall to create an urban space. Originally commissioned to improve delivery and fire egress, the bridge provides a new entrance and perspective toward the concert hall. The difference in height between its two ends is explicitly recognized by the design of the bridge. The horizontal silhouette of the bridge is defined by the balustrades. They are made of a vertical latticework of Azobe wood, so that from the Ketelvest and the nearby bridges it appears transparent rather than massive. However, if one stands immediately beside the bridge, the side walls appear solid. The bridge becomes a place in itself, an enclosed space that, through its trapezoidal form, lengthens or foreshortens the perspective, depending on which side it is being viewed. Anyone crossing the bridge is absorbed into the optical illusion created by the railings and deck.

VILLA

Location: Buggenhout, BE
Time: 2007–2010
Budget: EUR 350 000
Surface: 312 m²

This freestanding dwelling is situated in the middle of a parcel between woods and an agricultural area near the village of Buggenhout. The enclosure—a modular steel fence—is an integral part of the design and defines the volume of the house. The surrounding unkempt garden is not included, and functions as an automotive access around the house. The dwelling itself is composed of two levels: an open “outside house” on the ground floor, and a closed “inside house” on the first story, with views of the woods and rural landscape. The outside house is conceived as a patio villa with a garden. Its thick double walls—two load-bearing layers of standard brick, painted white—carry a concrete platform that forms the base for the inside house. The inside house is a compact set of rooms in the depth of the roof of the patio villa. This is conceived as a wooden box that covers the platform, which is made watertight by covering it completely with a dark plastic membrane. All detailing on this project is designed from the inside out: the huge sliding windows are added to the façade in such a way that the frames are invisible and do not impose on the impressive views. These are directed at the still open, rural landscape, while the neighboring houses remain relatively invisible. By deliberately moving the fence in from the edges of the property line, the dwelling becomes actually “freestanding”—a rare luxury in parcelized Belgium.

XPO

Masterplan, exhibition hall, entrance building and gallery

Location: Kortrijk, BE
Year: 2007–2009
Budget: EUR 11 500 000
Surface: 25 000 m²

In collaboration with Bureau Goddeeris Architectenvennootschap, Joachim Declerck, en Bureau Bas Smets

Kortrijk XPO is a typical exposition complex: a multifarious collection of similar halls, corridors connecting them to one another, and snippets of vegetation. As one unifying gesture, a frame is placed around this chaotic entity. This frame is made up of a gallery constructed as a modular steel grid, in both elevation and plan. Occasional metal screens make this frame alternately open and closed, oriented towards or screening off its asphalted and logical interior. Outside the frame the surroundings are natural and green. The entrance to the exposition hall is accented by an office building that adopts the structure of the frame, thus forming a gateway to the interior. The frame redefines the exposition side as a clear whole, delineating its place in the urban fabric. The frame is a gallery that imposes order on the entrances, passages, parking, and logistics. It gives the XPO site a recognizable façade that mediates between the scale of the visitor, that of the site, and that of the exhibition hall that it encloses.

COMPUTER SHOP

Commercial space, workshop, offices and appartement

Location: Tielt, BE
Year: 2008–2010
Budget: EUR 500 000
Surface: 450 m²

The party walls of a lot in Tielt are raised to their maximum height. On the side toward the street the elevated wall forms a wide entrance. Within this frame stand two identical buildings, mirror images opposite one another, thus defining an inner courtyard. The block on the street side contains a store and reception area; the block at the back of the lot contains the less public section, the logistics spaces. The twin buildings are constructed as matter-of-factly as possible out of the typical range of industrial techniques and materials. The structure consists of thin steel columns and beams, and steel deck floors. Both are clad with a pronounced curtain façade, partly filled in by glass, partly by polycarbonate panels. The courtyard defined by the two volumes functions as a parking and entrance zone.. The remaining space between the footprint of the buildings and the lot lines becomes a whimsical garden, as a complement to their regularity.

AFTER THE PARTY

Belgian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2008

Location: Venice, Italy
Year: 2008
Budget: EUR 150 000
Surface: 800 m²

Invited competition among 13 young Belgian practices, 1st price

In the Belgian pavilion for the 2008 Venice architecture biennale the existing pavilion building is enclosed by a seven-meter high wall—composed of standard Italian scaffolding that was rethought and redesigned—and thus separated from the predominant context of the architecture biennale. The floor of both the existing pavilion and the new “garden” is covered with a layer of confetti that is both pragmatic and symbolic. Chairs are spread here and there around the new pavilion to allow for moments of rest from the chaos of biennales past and present. The existing awning under the skylights of the pavilion was removed so that sunlight streams directly in. Visitors walk through between the two layers of the outer wall and enter the original pavilion through a side entrance, disorienting them before their experience of a new aggregate of spaces. In the new walled garden of the pavilion one can sit in the sun or under the shadow of trees. The new Belgian pavilion frames and displays the existing pavilion, a piece of architecture that has been constantly adapted and transformed over the years.

25 ROOMS

Villa in Ordos

Location: Ordos, CN
Year: 2008
Budget: EUR 1 000 000
Surface: 1000 m²

Part of the 'Ordos 100'-project, selected by Herzog & De Meuron, curated by Ai Weiwei

The design for a 1,000-square-meter residence in the Mongolian desert is reduced to the design of just one component, a room: a rectangular space with four entrances and no prescribed function. The room receives its individual character only through its ceiling height and its relative position in the house. Twenty-four identical rooms are organized over three stories, on each floor time forming an enfilade around a central atrium that is protected from harsh winds and sand storms. The inner garden is the actual outdoor space of the house, to which all of the rooms are oriented. Two flights of stairs, which stand in the middle of the room like pieces of furniture, provide the connection between the stories.

Because the building is sunken into the ground, only the top story can be seen in the residential neighborhood, like the tip of an iceberg. As in traditional Mongolian settlements, the house forms a microclimate: its underground position profits from the relatively constant ground temperature, tempering the extreme temperatures of the Mongolian climate. The structural base of the project is a massive concrete base, which by its weight prevents the house from being pushed up by the water force. The concrete wall decreases in width towards the top. Inside, the walls between rooms are doubled, and the space in between used to house the impressive array of ducts, vents, and other technical equipment required by a house of this comfort level. All rooms are equipped with double glass doors, allowing for each room to be closed off separately to maintain it’s singular logic.

The luxurious aspect of this residence is not in an extravagant form or use of materials, but in the abundance of spaces. The enigmatic twenty-fifth room on the roof is for the attendant: a lookout post on a thick wall.

WEEKEND HOUSE

House extension and renovation

Location: Merchtem, BE
Year: 2008–2012
Budget: EUR 550 000
Surface: 400 m²

This weekend house occupies the complete surface of a deep lot in small town in Flanders. The long backyard of an existing rowhouse is transformed into the weekend house proper; the whole length becomes the house, turning the existing building into a guest house. The new house is organized as a perspectival sequence of four equal rooms, thus providing a sequence of similar spaces whose infill is always different. The sequence of spaces organizes a variety of distinct characteristics—a garden, a pool house, a courtyard, a living room. Central wall openings create an enfilade throughout the different spaces and a sliding glass roof enhances the flexibility of their usage. Each of the rooms gets its specificity through its particular furniture. Together they form a set of interlocking mini-universes. The brick walls are doubled, allowing auxiliary features such as sliding glass doors, double doors, and a fireplace to be placed between the walls. A steel corniche, inspired by the rail of the sliding glass roof clearly frames the perimeter. The core of the house is formed by the middle two rooms: one with a fixed roof, where two wood elements make the space inhabitable; and the other is a tropical greenhouse with a mobile roof, which contains a bathroom unit and a swimming pool. On each side of these two rooms one finds a garden room. Closest to the living room is a simple green landscape, and between the green house and the guest house a paved courtyard. In the summer the mobile roof moves over the court, turning the sequence of the four rooms into a complete house, effectively creating a weekend house cut away from any sense of context and reality: a mirage. Each of the fixed elements in the room is an actor in the composition, carefully designed to live together with the residents and furniture.

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

Office building for VOKA, West-Flanders Chamber of Commerce
In collaboration with Bureau Goddeeris Architectenvennootschap and Bureau Bas Smets

Location: Kortrijk BE
Year: 2008–2010
Budget: EUR 3 500 000
Surface: 3 250 m2

Invited competition, 1st prize
Nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe-award 2011

This office building, housing the Chamber of Commerce in West Flanders, stands like a villa in the landscape of the urbanized edge of Kortrijk. The building is conceived as having two faces, like the Roman god Janus, showing distinctly different aspects to the street and the garden. The representative façade on the street side, completely of glass, displays the organization's operations like a billboard in a giant concrete cabinet. The only architecture within the open plan are the two prominent staircases. The entrance is on the more intimate side of the building facing the garden. Its V-shape frames a part of the landscape and embraces the entrance plaza with a lower-lying patio, around which all the public parts of the building are accommodated. Here Villa Voka forms the edge of the “meadow,” an open place in the wooded landscape. Both the façade and the plaza are finished with steel grid work that shields them from the sun out of the south, and also serves as a uniform and abstract material for the frame around several trees.

URBAN VILLA

Apartment complex in Geneva
Project by invitation of Christ & Gantenbein Architekten

Location: En Sully, Geneva, CH
Year: 2010
Surface: 1780 m²

A masterplan by Christ & Gantenbein Architects required different architecture offices to design a housing project in a dense garden-like structure, on a green hill overlooking Lake Geneva,. The master plan has ambiguous intentions: in density it is decidedly urban, in treatment of landscape and building types it tries to answer to the exceptionally loose landscape. The project, an urban villa, incorporates the two desires as mutually reinforcing, as it presents the twelve units in a housing volume that appears bigger than it is. By incorporating an inner court in the body of the house, the building acquires the critical mass it needs to deal with the overpowering landscape. At the same time the court allows for a building with one address without undoing the individual access to each of the units. The diamond-shaped perimeter creates both the structure and the border of the complex, effectively incorporating the patio fence and the terraces. The housing units are organized in a parallel fashion, between patio and outer perimeter, hence maximizing individual privacy and the view to the lake. The rhythm of this perimeter wall is the main elemental architectonic feature of the building.

WALL

Scenography for a theater play

Locations: Brussels, Ghent (BE) and Douai (FR)
Year: 2010
Budget: EUR 15 000
Surface: 314 m²

When a theater company requested scenery for an outside play called “The Wall” quickly it became clear that both the specificity of the play and the choice of site was forcing some more interesting decisions. Since the play happens around the decor, the wall had to be circular; since the actors were not supposed to enter the walled space, it had to be closed. The main focus was to design an object/intervention that did not look like a cylinder, but like a proper wall. By cutting the top in an oblique way one gets a glimpse of that what one cannot enter. The intervention had to be cheap and was to be constructed by the theater company itself, but had to be durable, since most of the time, in between plays, the wall was simply there without protection. These goals were achieved by using very light, undulating galvanized steel plates, used in two layers in different directions to create a stiff whole. Ultimately, by painting the interior steel plates bright yellow, the interior of the wall, inaccessible as it is, became from afar its protagonist: as a gigantic egg yolk or a sun perhaps.

GARDEN PAVILION

Installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2010
Project by invitation of Kazuyo Sejima, in collaboration with Bas Princen

Location: Venice, IT
Year: 2010
Surface: 240 m²

Winner of the Silver Lion for most promising young office

In 2010 Kazuo Sejima invited Piet Oudolf to design a beautiful garden at the very end of the Arsenale area of the Venice Biennale,. This intervention made an until then undiscovered building visible: a former ammunition storage on the edge of the newly designed garden. The curator realized the pavilion was too interesting to leave it empty and asked us to present our work in it. The storage facilities are made out of seven separate vaulted rooms, in rather decaying conditions. We invited photographer Bas Princen and decided to make a presentation about our mutual approach and interest in the image and the perspective. The seven rooms of the storage facilities looked like the perfect context for that. What was missing was a mutual connection—like a hallway—between the different rooms, as well as a spatial device to seek for a relation with the garden/park in front of it. The intervention to resolve both issues is as simple as it is effective. A parapet, or porch made out of an elegant white steel structure covered with a reflective silver roof fabric was positioned in front of the existing building. The new structure, placed along the entire length of the house, mirrors the existing pitch roof and thereby extends the existing pavilion with a new external gallery linking the seven rooms together. Under the roof one is not really in the building, not really in the park. Inside each of the seven rooms, a juxtaposition of images of both Office and the photographer Bas Princen are presented side by side on white aluminum plates. They are simply placed against the curved wall and, in each room, start to populate the space. The old depot doors we painted white as well, to make a more elegant entry between inside and outside. Outside, under the parapet, we added equally white chairs to sit and look at the garden. With a simple intervention the former ammunition storage became Garden Pavilion.

AGRICULTURE SCHOOL

Location: Leuven, BE
Year: 2010–2014 (under construction)
Surface: 3 240 m²
Budget: EUR 4 700 000

Selected competition, 1st prize

This agricultural school building is situated on the outskirts of Leuven, overlooking the city from its slightly elevated position in the landscape. The building consists of a linear block of five floors, housing the classrooms and facilities complemented by a horizontal volume—the sport hall—attached to it. The roof of the sport hall forms the playground with an equal volume. The playground lies before the classrooms, effectively working as the entrance to the school complex. This platform cuts through the class volume, marking the entrance to the school and providing a view to the school’s agricultural fields. The main feature of the school is a parallel set of stairs and landings between playground and sports hall on the one hand and the classrooms on the other. This set of stairs makes the main façade of the school building, executed in rough precast concrete, the mediator between all the school activities. The school’s façade is simply standard brick painted white. The entire volume of the school building turns away from the street to align with the orientation of the fields of the schoolyard. As a result the volume of the school makes a set of secondary spaces that provide the bike storage and an entrance ramps to the main premises.
The volume of the school makes a distinct angle with the street and the neighbouring buildings. Through its twisted position it finishes the existing geometric layout of the fields behind, and at the same time, by opening up like a gate, allows for a view over the fields towards the city of Leuven, almost as a staged medieval city portret.

Community centre in Tirua, Chile Project by invitation of Pezo & Ellrichshausen

Location: Tirua, Chile Year: 2010–2014 (in building preparation) Surface: 301 m² Budget: EUR 250 000 This community center pavilion, located in the small town of Tirua, is conceived as part of reconstruction efforts following a devastating earthquake in 20010. The pavilion is to serve as a cultural space and landmark for the local Mapuche Indian community. It is an ark, a simple box with surprising content. As a pavilion in the once inundated park, it presents itself as a concrete roof structure; a concrete dome providing a shelter for culture, shelter for activities. The dome structure is crude and basic and is again framed by the square outside perimeter of the box, leaving parabolic openings on each side of the building. A set of big wooden guillotine-like gates close off these openings. The dome in the box makes the cultural landmark of the Mapuche population. On three sides of the building the wooden gates, which are painted in Mapuche colors, provide a lattice from which light filters in. On the fourth side of the box a wooden construction (painted entirely in the fourth color) makes backstage and auxiliary rooms for the pavilion. The cupboard-like construction is a thick version of the other gates on its own, and together with the other gates, is in many ways the concrete dome’s counterpart: a refined wooden structure, elegant and precise, with only wood details. On top of the dome, one finds a hidden garden, only accessible by the public stair in the cupboard, a lookout post, a secret hideaway, and a sudden overview over the Pacific Ocean.

KUNSTMUSEUM

Extension of the Kunstmuseum in Sankt Gallen

Location: Sankt Gallen, CH
Year: 2011
Surface: 4 200 m²
Budget: EUR 4 700 000

Selected competition, 3rd prize
In collaboration with Bureau Dan Budik

The Kunst Museum in Sankt Gallen has been extended already once, unsuccessfully. This is no surprise, as the architecture of the original building, conceived by Johannes Kunkler, is very demanding and very dominant. It eats its transformations. Against the backdrop of the apparent timelessness of the original museum building, any addition looks like a temporary remark, a remnant of a specific timeframe.
The existing building’s main quality is a rigorous spatial organization. In the tradition of neoclassicism the rooms or spaces define a sequence with different light conditions. The building has (or at least should have) a rigorous vertical stratification. In the context of the extension, the best approach appears to be to copy what is already there. The intervention is extremely simple: when one reproduces underground the typical floor plan of the two existing (and successful) exhibition floors one gets another layer of the vertical stratification with entirely different light conditions.

In order to make this very simple idea possible, some precise interventions are necessary. First, each of the different floors have a specific relationship, through its openings and windows, with light and context. In order to make this also possible in the new underground floor, the projection of the plan is positioned within a rectangular perimeter. This creates a context with a very specific light condition, different from the other two floors but clearly part of the same family. Second, in order to idealize the layout of the existing basement plan under the current building, a very unique structural ceiling was developed. The design takes the existing forces, currently in the middle of the rooms, and diverts them to the walls. The specific but well equilibrated ceiling design gives a subtle identity to each of the museum rooms. This new ceiling mediates structure and—more importantly—the light of each of the rooms. Third, the complete surface of the new floor is significantly lowered. The floor directs and organizes the installations of the new museum floor. The glazed brick floor is at the same time datum, carpet, and technical condition of the enfilade. Fourth, the sequence of spaces thus created is organized through a specifically designed wall/door element.

The New Kunst Museum is an idealized version of the existing one. It presents itself as a stack of three very distinct museum conditions—in terms of light and orientation—within a similar plan. The extension is its new underground pedestal: an invisible museum.

DRYING HALL

Location: Herselt, BE
Year: 2011–2013 (in building preparation)
Surface: 2 200 m²
Budget: EUR 640 000

This industrial building, part of the infrastructure for a large tree plantation in Brabant, sits in the middle of fields of potted plants of varying scales; its main purpose is a space to dry potted plants twenty-four hours before distribution. This building is the most extreme and simple incarnation of a big box: a building envelope removed from anything even vaguely referring to function—a true building without content. The process for drying plants requires currents of air to enter but meanwhile protection from rain; therefore the building is designed as a perforated perimeter with a closed roof. The perforations give the viewer the impression of an almost nonexisting building, a building through which one can still see the silhouettes of plants temporarily stored, a building that does not land in the ground but floats in space. Its simple geometry—the result of two colliding straight-angled triangles—gives the building multiple appearances from different vantage points. It sometimes appears box-like, sometimes a perforated plane. The interior of this simple yet massive structure is constructed of hybrid laminated wood beams, painted white, and steel columns, whose rhythmic placement sets the spatial experience.