The reading room is a reading room in direct relation to its garden. A storage space, offices, a white cube, a chapel and a patio follow each other, as pure types of buildings where art can be experienced in different ways. The round base, containing studios and public functions, places itself at the southern corner of the building site. Its centripetal form collects a set of particular rooms that are easily accessible through the central space, which functions as storage. In our projects we try to counter this by making direct and precise spatial proposals, formal compositions without rhetoric. Akin to large pieces of furniture, these elements populate the space and are visible through the large greenhouse facade. OFFICE is renowned for its idiosyncratic architecture, in which realisations and theoretical projects stand side by side. Surrounded by the woods and colourful details from Bruegel’s painting, one is detached from the urbanised world, absorbed instead into the mise-en-scene for an artificial spatial experience of nature. The armrest, an exaggerated semi-circle, allows two-directional seating.Located in the historical port area around the Vauban basin along the Rhein, the housing block is a single large building which relates to the adjacent silos and large industrial structures. Four atria are cut out of the prismatic volume to provide open spaces of interaction. A minimal upgrade of its envelope creates a tempered outside climate. Nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe award 2011, the Belgian Architecture award 2012Seven Rooms, curated by Möritz Küng, was the first major retrospective exhibition of OFFICE, at deSingel Arts Campus in Antwerp, BE. In collaboration with DOGMA.The town house in the centre of Ghent is a stack of 20 identical rooms in five layers.
A saddle-shaped roof is delimited by a circular perimeter. The proportion of the towers allows for different programs, living, offices and the extension of the neighbouring hospital. In its shape the cross indicates the irregularity of the site. The reading garden is the center of the library, as the ‘largest room in the largest house’ of the municipality.‘Tondo’ is a footbridge that connects the House of Representatives’ offices with its recent extensions, the new Forum Building, on the other side of the Leuvensestraat in the centre of Brussels. The four spaces are flanked by a communal meeting room, whose triangular form distorts the simple geometry of the building, and plays a perspective game with visitors arriving on its parking lot. Named after the tradition of the ‘Tondo’, a circular renaissance painting, it’s shaped like a ring, and tucked between the two facades. The Majlis will be used as communal spaces for traditional music performances . Responding to the aim to produce olive oil of excellent and organic quality, the project strives to provide a small-scale yet highly performing and state-of-art olive oil mill.
Paintings and photo’s enforce or break the different antechamber perspectives and search for dialogue. Location: Waregem, Belgium.
This ambition requires a specific urban and constructive approach. All the reading rooms and book stacks look out on this patio. How to integrate the magnificent and very precarious existing structure, intensify its splendor and its intrinsic qualities, without compromising its architecture? Hence the design of the first Paco Rabanne shop mediates between total openness and total enclosure. On the street side they form terraces, and towards the courtyard they perform as anti-chambers, which provide additional exhibition space and resolve the circulation control to the different parts of the museum. 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 grid is cut off to create open, niche-like spaces at the extremes of the plan, which are left mostly open towards to outside. The old tower loses its function, but is preserved. The remaining space between the footprint of the buildings and the lot lines becomes a whimsical garden, as a complement to their regularity.Winner of the Belgian prize for Architecture & Energy 2013, non-residential categoryKortrijk XPO is a typical exposition complex: a multifarious collection of similar halls, corridors connecting them to one another and snippets of vegetation. This city is formed by a large square of 482 x 482 metres that is surrounded by a colonnaded structure, like a thick rampart. 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. Both volumes stand at a slight angle to the grid of the city. In order to double the surface of a seemingly freestanding house in this strangely lush environment, it was decided to elegantly underline the existence of everything there already was, to celebrate the status quo and to simultaneously make the addition disappear by making it extremely visible, making it, in a sense, the protagonist. Through the cross, the rooms are freed from both functional demands and the capriciousness of the site.