Accattone #1 (preview)

JARO STRAUB 6 76 VICTOR HORTA 8 SIMON BOUDVIN 16 ANNE HOLTROP 28 70 BAS PRINCEN 28 MAAIKE LAUWAERT 28 DE VYLDER VINCK TAILLIEU 38 86 MIES VAN DER ROHE 48 ROBBRECHT EN DAEM 48 CHRISTIANE LANGE 48 SANDRO DELLA NOCE 62 90 GILLES POURTIER 62 GUILLAUME GATTIER 62 ALVAR AALTO 72 OSCAR TUAZON 78

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Accattone is a dedicated space for architecture documents: an interview, a visual essay, a drawing, are laid out as fragments of a montage transversal to the issue. Contents are manipulated mostly through their visual condition. From their sheer confrontation, several themes emerge. The implicit, allusive character of the analogy is preferred to the over-determination of the text, especially of the essay format. Exploring these editorial possibilities is an attempt to go beyond the simplistic assumption that only text-based magazines are “critical” and that our visually-oriented cultural condition is necessarily un- or post-critical.

Away from the fast and oblivious mechanism of production-consumption of the web, the printed format and its slow periodicity combine the characteristics of the work-in-progress with the finiteness of the object.

This oscillation characterises the first issue of the magazine. In most of the featured projects, be it by artists or architects, the object is the main referent of the work. Somehow, in terms of focalisation, it almost fills the entire space of the frame. The barns visited and photographed by Sandro Della Noce, Guillaume Gattier and Gilles Pourtier are first of all objects, extracted from their immediate context and classified as inspirational stepping stones for future artwork; only then they are also signs of a social practice in Quebec. The Batara pavilion by Anne Holtrop is the result of the process of transformation of physical matter – formless sand – into an object, without other constraints; the title of the work and the pictures by Bas Princen expand the semantic values of the work, but they don’t dim its objecthood. The stones of a façade by Victor Horta are taken by the technical draftsmen not as accountable parts of a building to recompose, but as individual objects, protagonists of a scientific investigation that only then will become part of a logical architectural construct. In his works on anastylosis, Simon Boudvin takes his motives from history, with its political meaning and the reasons of its dismantling, but the process he unfolds deals only with objects – the stones, the hangar, the data sheet with the numbering of the stones, the door key, the log, the fallen roof of the barn – appropriated by the artist through photography, displacement and model-making.

Objects are the beginning and very often the result of the creative process. But the being object of these projects depends on the point of view. This condition becomes most evident with 1:1 scale models: from the infinite distance of the architect manipulating a small object, we become visitors immersed within the object, looking outside. The ambiguity of the walkable model is evident when comparing the view of Robbrecht en Daem’s Golf Club as seen from a plane with the pictures taken at eye-level; the latter let appear qualities of the ‘object’ – the pavilion – that go well beyond it, in this case the landscape of Krefeld and the dramaturgic qualities of Mies’s architecture.

From abstract, manipulable object, the model becomes a site-specific installation. In Batara, this ambiguity is located within the codes of representation of the gallery space: photographing the smaller model at eye-level, and replacing a miniaturised photograph next to the same model, Bas Princen and Anne Holtrop anticipate the building of the model at full scale ― something that will happen only a year after, in the Belmonte Arboretum.1 Photography is indeed a method which is used transversally in all the projects featured in the magazine, exceeding a mere documentary role; it shifts the status of the pictured objects and creates additional levels of meaning.

In the process of enlargement of the working scale, from that of the concept to that of the full realisation of the project, there is no or little detachment of the authors from their object ― very little of the mediation which is the proper of the typical building process: from sketches to the writing and drawing of specifications, to data sheets and the construction executed by thirds. The closeness of the authors to their work is the condition for experimentality. Alvar Aalto built his Summer House as if making a model in his studio: “a house to play with”. The height of the table made by Simon Boudvin corresponds to the length of his arm, the shape of its legs results from the blind digging of his hand. This approach to materiality is described by Anne Holtrop as “material gesture”: materials and their possibilities lead the creative process, dispossessing the author of his admitted, ‘clean’ intellectual detachment from dirty matter.

“I am interested in a possible architecture. In my work I start with form or material that often comes from outside of it. In the conviction that things can always be re-examined and reinterpreted, they can also be seen as architecture. The way someone can see a butterfly or a lake in the ink blots of a Rorschach test. I want to look freely – more or less without a plan – at material gestures and found forms and let them perform as architecture. In this way, architecture emerges by imagining a next step to the previous steps that have been taken. I want the work to remain interpretable exactly the way it originated.”2 Certainly it is a form of performance, like the peculiar acting voice chosen by Oscar Tuazon in his text “An Existing House”: a rebuilder’s stream of consciousness. These practices have

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1 The small model by Anne Holtrop and the pictures by Bas Princen were exhibited at the Leth & Gori gallery, Copenhagen, 30 June – 7 September 2012, and at the collective exhibition “Triggering Reality” at the Luigi Pecci contemporary art centre, Prato (IT), 16 December 2012 – 10 March 2013. The full-scale model was realised later, for the openair exhibition at the Arboretum Belmonte, in Wageningen (NL), 14 June – 15 September 2013, at the tenth exhibition Beelden op de Berg titled “(Re)Source over authenticiteit en manipulatie”.

2 Anne Holtrop, “A Possible Architecture”, in OASE no. 90, What Is Good Architecture? (May 2013), p. 23-26.

3 Online Etymology Dictionary: “late 14c., ‘actual, solid,’ from Latin concretus ‘condensed, hardened, thick, hard, stiff, curdled, congealed, clotted,’ figuratively ‘thick; dim,’ literally ‘grown together;’ past participle of concrescere ‘to grow together,’ from com- ‘together’ + crescere ‘to grow’. A logicians’ term until meaning began to expand 1600s. Noun sense of ‘building material made from cement, etc.’ is first recorded 1834.”

undeniably something in common with “Poesia concreta” and “Musique concrète”; when dealing with buildings, the adjective and noun forms of the term concrete get to a kind of etymological reconciliation.3 Authors, actors, processes and materials share responsibility in the project. At the same time, several categories inherent in everyday architecture lose importance, beginning with the program and the scenario. If these tools deal with the future, all projects published here express on the contrary a strong bond with the here and now, even when the reality they take inspiration from is fictional or resulting from an altered representation of the past. This is the case with the article by Rem Koolhaas on “The House that Made Mies”, serving as an inspirational motive for the 1:1 scale model built in Krefeld by Robbrecht en Daem. In the Barns project, considering the colourful paintings on the façades, Sandro Della Noce had seen an influence from Native Americans tapestries and their symbology; this intuition has then been denied by the local historian he contacted, but it will remain latent in the future work. De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s “triggering pictures” resonate with the “found forms” of Anne Holtrop’s investigation of the dialectic between formal and informal. Such images do not account as exemplary formal compositions, but as allegories of the architects’ possible attitude to adopt in the approach of any architectural project. This analogical collection is very similar to Le Corbusier’s objets à réaction poétique, in the flattened form of the photograph.

Objects stimulate actions, images shift the status of objects, histories inspire practices. The themes of objecthood and of performance transverse this issue, in their quite antinomic reciprocal positions. Their oscillation is reflected in the way the content is presented: the editorial take moves on from the presentation of a finished, self-standing work of art or architecture – the typical showcase of exemplary projects – to investigate the process that led to their creation. This intersection of objects and processes is achieved through interviews, the presentation of working documents, and occasionally the texts written by the contributors. Being part of the same printed space, these elements and ideas cast a light not only on the work to which they refer, but also on the others: their intertextuality creates a woven fabric in which meaning can travel across the magazine and interrogate each content.

Like fragments of broken vases and dismantled façades can be mounted together in new configurations, these elements allow for new possible interpretations and geometries. Text and texture, plot, vase, cooking pan, bricks and tiles share the same etymological terms: testu, testum, textum, textūs, texta. Ancient texts were written on clay tablets, then cooked like bricks. The gesture of weaving a fabric is analogous to storytelling. In ancient Rome, for three centuries (I-III century AD), the ships coming from the colonies unloaded their amphoras full of oil and other goods at the same wharf. Once emptied, amphoras were broken and stockpiled, then covered with lime to prevent the bad smells; these fragments formed an artificial mound, the Monte Testaccio, still visible today near the pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Aurelian Wall and the non-catholic cemetery. For several centuries, up until the 18th century, the pottery wastes were quarried and reused to build roads, drains, or as aggregate in concrete constructions. Caves were dug on its sides, exploiting the good climatic conditions to storage food and wine. In a single image, the Testaccio mound expresses the operations of appropriation, state-transformation, representation and recomposition featured in this first issue of Accattone.

Carlo Menon & Sophie Dars

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QUARRIES — JARO STRAUB

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From the series CCHH, b/w negative prints, 2011.

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1 The study on the façade was led by architects Nicolas Creplet and commissioned by the “Direction des Monuments et Sites” of the Brussels Region, which owns the façade (architect Guy Conde-Reis).

Parallel to the exhibition of the façade to the public, some original furniture of the Hôtel Aubecq was exhibited at the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels, 1 July – 9 October 2011 (catalogue: Victor Horta – Hôtel Aubecq, Guy Conde-Reis ed., Brussels: DMS, 2011).

This text is a free adaptation of the report describing the digital remounting of a façade by Victor Horta, the Hôtel Aubecq, built in 1899 and demolished in 1950. The original report was written by the technical draftsmen O’Point Associates (Nicolas Beullekens and Christian Chaldron, with collaborators Nicolas Angelo, Bruno Lintermans, Stéphane Huart) as part of a broader study on the façade.1 The final result of their work can be seen on the website: www.hotel-aubecq.be

Hotel Aubecq: Stones VICTOR HORTA

We will develop here on the choice of the techniques for the 3D collection of the stones, on the software and the programming that was necessary to handle such a mass of data, and on the methodology used to remount the façade, together with some observations on the implications of these virtual operations.

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The postcard shows the impact made by bullets fired on La Populaire by the police forces on 3 June 1912.

Demolition of the building prior to final demolition in 1974.

Photograph courtesy of Mr Francotte.

Numbered façade stones before the 1974 demolition.

Photographs selected from the file provided by Mr. Francotte.

Photograph (of the 50s?) of which the original (4’’x 5’’) is lodged in the ILHS archives (Liège Institute of Social History).

Elements stored in the city of Liège’s warehouse at 376 Vivegnis Street.

The inventory did not cover all elements.

Elements of La Populaire (numbers dating from 1974 are in yellow, those of the inventory of the 90s in red, made by archaeologist Catherine Gallimont).

Hand-produced account of façade blocks dating from the 90s stock-taking by draftsman Frédéric Nandrin.

The file is lodged in the Archaeological department of the Liège City administration.

Ground reconstitution of La Populaire’s façade in 1999.

Coordination and photographs by C.G. (the raised photographic platform was hired by the TV crew of a local channel who produced a report at the occasion of Heritage Day).

The following notes are excerpted from the working diary of Simon Boudvin.

21-02-11 The photograph, or the project of a photograph meant to be the starting point of the exhibition or of the exhibition project a year ago, isn’t there.

The subject of this photograph has configured the encounter of these two pompous terms: analstylosis and reconversion.

This is about a specific barn situated in a village in the North-East of Germany: a shelter for cows, farming vehicles and straw, whose walls are made from pieces of the Berlin Wall, and the rest out of dismantled material of the Iron Curtain. This is recycling, a reconversion, a displacement and a reorganisation of materials.

The farmer, Armin (who was described to me as someone who would wait for me with his shotgun if I tried to approach the barn to take a picture) was a border patrol in 1989 and tried to take advantage of the fall of the wall after the loss of his job. He literally went back home with the wall.

Nowadays the city of Berlin aims to remount a portion of the wall with its original parts. A fake relic of the past, a monument, a project of anastylosis. But the material has become rare, sold in small pieces together with postcards at the “Checkpoint Charlie”, or in bigger pieces at auction sales. Armin’s son has understood that he could sell his father’s farm to the city of Berlin or to other collectors.

Thus the situation: Armin the father is waiting for me with his shotgun because he thinks that my taking a picture of his building would herald its demolition and removal. On the other hand, Armin’s son is eager to inherit this material property for its immaterial, symbolical value.

This story is common to all the pieces of the exhibition and to the buildings hosting them.

FAÇADE 01 (LIÈGE, BELGIUM) 20-10-09 C.L., a Brussels architect, on visit in Paris for an experiment in “modernology” at the Ecole Spéciale, informs me of the existence of dismantled buildings stocked in Belgium. T.M., a civil servant, puts me in touch with C.G., an archaeologist in charge of the inventory of stones in the possession of Liège’s town hall.

22-11-09 In the 70s, reconstruction projects, carried by a buoyant economy, found themselves short of rubble sites or potato fields, and had to undertake a demolition campaign to pursue their development. Consistent with this material observation, it may be said that progress is the equal of natural or war disasters. In 1974, some buildings were meticulously destroyed in the town centre of Liège, in the Saint-George isle. The façade stones were numbered, and wrought-iron items and decorative woodworks dismantled. All were stocked in the city’s warehouses awaiting a possible/fictitious reconstruction. Among these buildings are elements from a church, a people’s house, the popular St-Hubert’s church.

Since the 1886 revolt, socialist militants opened up People’s Houses in main cities situated

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in the Walloon Basin, on the model of the ‘Progrès de Jolimont’. This first involved a cooperative organisation, its bakery where bread was sold at a fair price to workers, then a brewery, a café-restaurant, a hotel, an auditorium, a gym, a cinema theatre, meeting rooms. People’s Houses are soon erected in front of churches, town halls or law courts of all industry-based communes. They are real social centres, centres of assistance, of culture and ideological propaganda; they house the vagrant population in search of employment, shelter all things relative to community questions, and offer, in city centres, visibility of the struggles experienced in factories.

On 1 May 1894, La Populaire de Liège takes up residence in the Hotel de Méan, a 17th Century building on Green Square, and annexes adjacent buildings to include the cooperative’s activities at the height of the syndicate’s glory. On 3 June 1912, a riot gets out of hand and militants are violently repressed, some of whom take refuge in La Populaire. The police forces open fire on the building’s front. Three rioters are killed. The marks left by the bullets are photographed and numbered.1 I cannot tell which of the two buildings was preserved, the Hotel de Méan or the La Populaire de Liège… because I cannot tell which of the two was destroyed: the hotel, to gather funds needed for building lodgings or to buy supplies? Or the People’s House, to silently mark the end of socialist cooperatives? Or both? The huge works of the 70s, the demolitions of which still resound like the muted bombing of the Cold War, and the constructions, marking the end of the conflict?

Everywhere in Europe, People Houses are on the decline, their attendance reduced to nothing, their existence fast becoming obsolete. The buildings are sold off and demolished.

The architects’ international congress opposes – by a unanimous vote – the demolition of the Maison du Peuple de Bruxelles, a vast Art Nouveau style programme launched by Victor Horta and Richard Pringiers. They obtain the preservation of the dismantled building in Tervuren. An anastylosis or reconstruction project fails in Jette, the wrought-iron elements having gone rusty (they were stored in a field), then stolen and resold to an ironmonger.

S.D. lends me her car. I have an appointment with C.G. in the Liège’s high administrative tower.

Handwritten inventory sheets, photographs of dismantled buildings, drawings of stone blocks on grid paper by a comic strip artist colleague, all elements referring to the Saint-George isle are produced: not to program a reconstruction, but to enable local councillors to compare the inherited value of the vestiges against the problem of cluttered storage (evaluations regularly carried out by librarians and archivists). The façades lying on the ground are cumbersome. C.G. hands me the key to the Vivegnis warehouse. A long key, often broken and repaired.

23-10-09 Wake-up at S.C. and J.B.’s in the cats’ chamber/ music room of the architects who put me up. I return to Vivegnis Street with this key which won’t hold in my pocket and which reminds me

of a key from a fairy tale. The gate belongs to a condemned industrial land, and consists of a tall and large metallic structure, rusty and perforated in order to insert a chain with a lock. The gate is twenty meters away from the building with, here and there, scattered broken down slabs and, over and above tall grass, numbered stone blocks marked in red and yellow. The long key turns with ease in the lock, but the door to the warehouse, swollen by the rain, is so stiff that I have the impression I am forcing and destroying it.

Rain is falling in the warehouse. Moss and fern complete the image of the ruin. On one side of the gallery (as huge as a museum), stones are laid out in cubes on pallets; on the other, the wrought-iron elements and decorative woodwork, rusting and rotting.

The factory offers shelter to the workers’ house – a ruin contained in another. What a lugubrious encounter when one considers that the workers of this factory, situated on Vivegnis street, came regularly to La Populaire. Faced with this interlocked situation, I cannot remember what I came to photograph in this location and find myself confronted with an excavation problem: the archaeologist clears medieval vestiges to make way for antiquity’s strata. Photographic trials hardly manage to detect these deposits.

And yet here – as long as the factory does not cave in, mixing its rubble with those it shelters – between these mineral layers, I can still circulate through the cracks.

TABLE 02 (CHELLES, FRANCE) 04-05-10 The play of deconstructing cubes in Peter Eisenman’s Guardiola House produces several L-shapes, as well as, in plan, some intermediate, inhabitable spaces. In section, the house seems to fall down the cliff on which it is perched (in the Cadiz bay). Rolling down, it leaves some solid imprints. As in a 3D chronophotograph, in its fall the cube freezes in a position, while its double continues the ride. But for Eisenman, these are just movements of the mind, immaterial cubes animated in the paper space – or language space – of a cube without any weight nor matter.

The deconstructed object is an ideal volume, not a real one.

One could shift this scenario from a conceptual state to its actual realisation. The cube, armed concrete, the concrete cube falling down the slope, etc. The document handed out to the builder would no more consist of an axonometry of a very complex arrangement of blocks, but a statement, expressed like a recipe: – Build a cube, 5m wide, with reinforcing steel bars.

– Place it on the site.

– Cast an horizontal slab on the face in contact with the ground.

– With a bulldozer, lift the cube and turn it on one side.

– Cast a second slab on the face in contact with the ground.

– Repeat this for all six faces, using additional formwork to create the wanted openings.

An artificial rock is thus obtained; its outer faces have taken up the shape of the ground (its relief,

its materiality), while on the inside the surfaces have been worked until plane and smooth.

02-06-10 J.D. dug a hole in the donkeys’ field. Its depth corresponds to the length of his arm; the diameter to the width of his hand. He has left there a handful of silver candies (like small steel beads) and has covered the whole thing with grass. It is not easy to distinguish a particular sheaf of grass among the others. Especially when his observers cannot help him: we don’t know much about the reason why we are following him and he doesn’t really announce what is he looking for.

For a while, I thought that he had dug the hole as a trap to get revenge on the donkeys, considered guilty of a lack of collaboration to his experiment, despite the bribes (in fact J.D. had been giving banknotes to the donkeys, which they swallowed).

24-08-10 The curator of the Port-musée in Douarnenez confirms she possesses a Lambot concrete boat in her storage space and she seems inclined to lending it to me, but I renounce creating an exhibition about concrete, the history of the material and its representation. It would have looked good in a gothic church, though, her bow imitating the broken arcs.

02-09-10 I am exhausted. So I won’t lie on the ground, I lie on the table, on my belly, my chin resting on the edge – so I can see what lies underneath – and my ear pressed against the wood. Letting an arm loose to release my shoulder, I try to touch the ground without success. I fall asleep in this position which by the time I wake up reveals its discomfort.

09-11-10 I started my project of casting a concrete table in Chelles. The chief of maintenance of gardens and parks pointed to a grassy area under her office window, where I could play without disturbing, at the condition of not asking for assistance. With the help of J.-B.R. (architecture student) I dig four holes corresponding to the height of the table, then fill those with the steel bars which will arm the concrete. We repeated this operation for the mould of two benches of the same length. The concrete mixture to fill-in our work was brought today, and by tonight there was nothing left to see but three little rectangular surfaces, which I carefully smoothed at the end of the morning. I just can’t imagine what the table - which I chose to display at the exhibition – will look like, as no static calculation was made. I hardly believe that this moist gravel will form a solid block.

There is nothing on this site to please me (because the employees are more intrigued by an artist at work than by the object of my activity), but one thing is funny though – again, historical: it was a gardener (Joseph Monier) who first registered the licence of armed concrete, to build orange potteries. He must have had at hand the same unadapted tools as I do: a square spade, a small transplant shovel.

LOG 01 (LES ARQUES) 01-07-99 Visit of Vukovar. The town – at the confluence of the Danube and the Vuka river, marking the border between Serbia and Croatia – is in ruin. The walls are still standing, while wooden floors and carpentries are gone. All carbonised elements have served as a fertile compost on the ground floor of each building. Nowadays, walking down the streets, you can observe an abundant vegetation hiding behind each facade and window frame. Trees have grown in these light-wells, representing a mass of wood comparable to the one lost in the destruction of the floors. They pass the brick walls to substitute their crown to the rooftops. I expected to see the town to the ground, but eight years after the end of conflict I am confronted with vertical ruins.

01-05-10 It is an ancient stable in the Arques region whose ancient walls support a brand new roof. A small stable, just enough room to host four animals.

It doesn’t shelter anything now but the wormeaten wood of its previous roof and collapsed floor. Wooden boards, curved, with rounded corners, from which G.P. and C.J. already took some sculptures and supports for painting. I place the boards against the back wall according to their size and lay down on the grass the ones belonging to the wooden floor. I brush them and proceed to a second selection to get ten boards of similar length and thickness, then I order them according to their width. By inserting wedges (new ones that I stole from a building materials store with E.S.) I recomposed the log as it probably had come out of the sawmill.

29-06-10 From Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Or Life in the Woods, 1854: “I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one.

When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high.

It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. […]

The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. […] I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pondside by small cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. […]

Boards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $8.03½ (Mostly shanty boards.)

Refuse shingles for roof and sides . . . $4.00 Laths. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.25 Two second-hand windows with glass $2.43

One thousand old brick . . . . . . . . . . . $4.00 Two casks of lime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $2.40 (That was high.)

Hair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0.31 (More than I needed.)

Mantle-tree iron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0.15 Nails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $3.90 Hinges and screws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0.14 Latch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0.10 Chalk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0.01 Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.40 (I carried good part on my back.)

In all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $28.12½” 01-07-10 C.B. finds the barn too empty so I promise her to bring more boards. J.D. – always enthusiastic and available to help as soon as a simple idea is the promise of an excessive effort – offers to carry the boards laid down on a ladder used as a stretcher. The barn’s existence had been revealed to me by D.C., but we (R.Z., J.-L.M. and myself) couldn’t find it during our walks. J.D. knew where it was. He had discovered it during one of his rectilinear walks. Without doubt the only way to stumble upon it. Lost in the woods, it was leaning against a pile of stones – without doubt marking the corner of a plot.

Only the frame is left. Tiles are piled up next to it. The cladding was ripped off and all you can see now are some nails sticking out of the poles and some wooden boards on the ground, as if they had naturally fallen out (simultaneously).

The cabin has been deconstructed methodically although rapidly.

Batten and rafters were only taken away from one side of the pile (which must have been used in place of a ladder) and are still resting on top.

We start our collection. Water-saturated planks break under their own weight. To dry them we carefully stand them against tree trunks in the right order, then pick them up, each pack marked and assigned to a specific side : north, south, east and west. I never found out why it had been dismantled in the first place.

02-07-10 The barn underwent a strange transformation: its siding has been replaced with walls of cinder blocks: a crude filing of its irregular structure.

Brambles and bindweed are coming in through large empty windows. Inside, the ground covered in dirt or dust - follows the inclination of the outdoor slope, as if part of the land had been roofed before being enclosed 50 years later.

The project is abandoned, the construction is unfinished. Inside this barn it feels like we are standing outside.

It is a practical, sheltered, airy place, ideal for stocking wood or store a sculpture and make it invisible. With the help of S.G.L, I build a parallelepiped stack from the boards we collected the day before.

1 Jean Moors, La Belle époque des maisons du peuple en province de Liège (Liège: Jean Moors, 2007), pp. 132-141. Mario Scascighini, La maison du peuple, le temps d’un édifice de classe (Lausanne: Presses techniques et universitaires romandes, 1991).

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Ongoing work consisting at the moment of models, photos and a pavilion.

Batara

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP

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Sometimes you see something that confuses you thoroughly.

The work Batara, an outdoors pavilion made of concrete, sandcast walls by Dutch architect Anne Holtrop, is such a work.

The concrete walls have a soft, slick inner side and a rough, knobbly outer skin. Batara is upon first inspection clearly not from this day and age. It is pre-Medieval, it is brutalist, it looks carved from stone like a cave. You imagine it must be situated somewhere on the Anatolian plateau. But upon closer inspection, the work reveals itself as extremely contemporary (it couldn’t be more of this day and age if it was made from high tech materials) and to be standing on a grassy field amidst what are clearly European trees. The contemporaneity of Batara is the result of a complex web of collapsing references related to time, space and materials. This interpretative flexibility is part and parcel of the work of Holtrop and something he consciously aims to achieve.

It is no wonder that the pavilion was realized in the context of a Dutch exhibition called (Re)Source, that dealt with the tension between the original or the source, and the manipulated.

Generally speaking, we approve of the original and are skeptic about the manipulated. But in our current image culture (and scientific reality for that matter) it is almost impossible to differentiate between original and fake. The two positions often bleed into each other or stand in for one another. What was once clearly manipulated, say plastics, has now almost an authentic feeling to it given that materials have evolved so drastically over the last decades. Batara balances in a tantalizing and delicious way between original, source (evoking images of a cave or an old religious location), and something that has clearly been manipulated (from certain angles the pavilion even has a 3D-printed feel to it).

This balancing forces you to keep looking and makes for a work that is confusing in a positive sense, that seems to slip away from attempts at classifying it and that simply resists being pinned down. However heavy and solid Batara looks, its connotations and references are agile and footloose.

Maaike Lauwaert

pp. 28-31 Model, 2012, gypsum, pigments, wood, 10 elements, 120 x 300 x 170 cm. In collaboration with Bas Princen. Exhibition: Leth & Gori Copenhagen (DK) p. 32 Release of the sand cast walls for the pavilion, Summer 2013 pp. 34-37 Pavilion, 2013, concrete, pigment, steel, 3.4 x 12.3 x 7.4 m.

Collection WUR (NL).

Photos: Bas Princen

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Interview by images. We would like to explore Jan de Vylder, Inge Vinck and Jo Tailleu’s relationships to the image, between visual culture and creative process, drawing tools and building materials, architecture and representation. Are images a means or an end?

Their website and publications show a generous amount of images of all kinds. Each project is presented through a collection in which rough drafts have the same status as commissioned photographs. Maybe this reveals an attempt to exhaust the imaginary field of the creative process.

We are interested in all these ‘families’ of images, emerging before, during and after the project.

Their now famous picture, “No longer Sol LeWitt, but then what is it?” – displaying a found Sol LeWitt’s mural drawing carefully disrespected by an anonymous electrician – can be considered as a triggering picture insofar it stages a friction between a reference in contemporary art and the bricoleur. Representing an anecdote jeopardising a master reference, this hybrid image makes sense as a possible analogy of the work of aDVVT. In their practice, drawings are not only means of representation, but also critical tools intervening throughout the design process. A drawing can stir the project in a new direction. Do these images participate in the fabrication of the project’s imaginary, or only as an afterthought? How do they relate to the thinking of architecture?

Be it readymade pictures or images produced for a project, we like to think that these images enter the studio’s Musée imaginaire. Are there some in particular which have an afterlife of their own, becoming new found objects for any project to come? Or do they only function in association with others?

The San Gottardo Double JAN DE VYLDER"INGE VINCK"JO TAILLIEU

1. Do you collect images?

Yes 2. How are your images classified?

De-classified.

De-order is the status of any picture; yet used or not; that’s the condition to be used and re-used at any time.

3. How do they take place in the workspace?

All of a sudden.

Images are imminently present. But the moment they are used is led by that moment.

Just all of a sudden.

4. How do you keep alive your iconographic archive?

Looking around.

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Seeing what is not for any use yet at that point; but what is strange enough to discover.

5. How can an image be strong enough?

One only moment.

Even that point of interest; it can be only interesting when it has the perfect conditions.

6. How do images become future references?

We do not understand ourselves.

But all of a sudden; it happens. All kinds of things seem to come together. And are unable to be seen separate ever anymore.

7. How do you transform a reference into architecture?

Once again; from image to reference and from reference to architecture: all of a sudden.

8. Give an image that precedes the project.

The SAN GOTTARDO double.

The project called N16.

The project called APRIL.

Route N16, aDVVT, 2013, photo: Filip Dujardin

April, aDVVT, 2013, photo: Filip Dujardin / Canvas

9. Give an image that emerges during the design process.

The SAN GOTTARDO double.

The white brings everything together.

In an other way than it did before.

In Willebroek stands a house.

A double.

And a tree.

And a fence.

No one saw the house.

The setting.

It was left.

The white brought it back.

The double.

The tree and the fence.

Still left.

But now clearly left.

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Previous spread: “The House That Made Mies” is a text by Rem Koolhaas extracted from S, M, L, XL (1995), about the Kröller-Müller House. It is reproduced here from the pages of the magazine ANY.1

1:1 Scale Models ROBBRECHT EN DAEM!CHRISTIANE LANGE

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1 ANY no. 5, Lightness (March/April 1994), pp. 14-15.

Reproduced with the kind permission of Cynthia Davidson / Anyone Corp.

2 Christiane Lange, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Architecture for the Silk Industry (Berlin: Nicolai Verlag, 2011). Helge Drafz and Christiane Lange “Mies in Krefeld” (DVD, 56’, Builtby.Tv, 2011).

3 Haus Lange and Haus Esters are two villas designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1927-30. They are still used for contemporary art exhibitions.

Christiane Lange is an art historian. After researching the early works of Mies van der Rohe in Krefeld, Germany, between 1927 and 1938, she asked Robbrecht en Daem architecten to work from the original documents of an unbuilt Golf Club that he had designed in 1930. From 26 May to 27 October 2013, a singular full-scale model of this project was mounted on its original location in Krefeld. The idea behind the project was to exhibit Mies’s Golf Club through the direct experience of its spatiality. This content is based on a conversation with Christiane Lange, Paul and Johannes Robbrecht at their studio in Ghent, on 19 November 2013.

Accattone Several themes revolve around the first issue of Accattone: representation and its shifting layers between reality and abstraction; visual culture and found objects as a way to inspire a creative process; architecture design by the making, in a new combination between ideas and physical process; and finally the theme of the transformation of objects through architectural or curatorial operations. The Golf Club project that you did in Krefeld comprises most of these themes.

How did the project begin?

Christiane Lange The idea started with a research I conducted on the ten projects that Mies van der Rohe made in collaboration with his clients from Krefeld, which corresponds to an underestimated period in his work and in the history of the city of Krefeld. It is interesting because it is a wide range of projects. I had already made a book and a film; 2 in this context we thought that it would be interesting to have an exhibition. But a classical architectural exhibition with drawings, pictures and models is only interesting if you know very much on the subject, if you are an architect or art historian.

It is not an experience, it is just knowledge.

The second input was the 1:1 scale model of Mies’s design for the Kröller-Müller House in 1912. I knew the story about it and I always found it as exaggerating as intriguing: it is a little bit extreme to have a 1:1 model just to see if it fits in the landscape and if the client likes it, but on the other hand I liked this idea of the exhibition being exaggerated, and it being a model. So I said to myself, let’s try it!

Choosing the Golf Club was also an important part of the process: there are three unbuilt projects by Mies in Krefeld, but the Golf Club is Mies at his best, at the top of his development of architecture. This is when Robbrecht en Daem architecten joined the project.

A. What oriented this choice? Were you interested in the confrontation between the two works, that of Mies van der Rohe and that of Robbrecht en Daem architecten?

p. 50 Robbrecht en Daem architecten, Mies 1:1 Golf Club Project, 2013, photo: Maximiliaan Royakkers

Paul Robbrecht Krefeld has been a kind of focus in our lives for a long time. It was at a time when my partner Hilde Daem and I used to visit very often its exhibitions, which provided marvellous moments from the late 1970s to the 1990s. There were the exhibitions at the House Lange and House Esters curated by Julian Heynen: the generation of artists on show at that period were very important for us. 3 Our work is in dialogue with those artists like Thomas Schütte, Juan Muñoz, or Belgian artists like Jan Vercruysse.

We were very close, we were growing together. There were also exhibitions by older artists, like Gerhard Richter who exhibited his Baader-Meinhof series in the House Lange, a very powerful moment; it was an opening without being an opening, people were just there. So there is a kind of relationship between us and Krefeld, which ended more or less when Julian Heynen was no longer its director.

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A. You built a building, but still you get to convey the idea that it is a model. There is a good balance between what Bertolt Brecht calls Verfremdung, or the critical distanciation that happens when the theatre’s machineries are revealed to the public, and a kind of emotive adherence to the project through its space: on one hand you want to believe it, and on the other you know that you are just in a model.

C.L. We wanted as a result to make people aware that the pavilion is not the architecture of an exhibition, but the exhibition itself. An exhibition with one exhibit, the 1:1 Model. Turning the concept of the exhibition upside down, one piece is the starting point of different stories: of Mies’s commissions for Krefeld clients, of Mies as an architect, but also of Robbrecht en Daem as contemporary architects exploring Mies.

To me it was very important that the model would be walking on the very thin path of showing something while not pretending to be anything else than a model: showing architecture but not pretending to be architecture; showing a wall without being a wall. You can easily step out of this path and take the wrong direction.

A. So, as a historian you decided to take the slippery path of creating something anew, avoiding the safer ground of showing the historical evidences you retrieved from the archives.

C.L. This is what we wanted. As an art historian it was extremely interesting, an unusual experience and a totally different way of proceeding than simply analysing his drawings. I learned that when you build something you go so deep and so close into the design that you get a very different idea of Mies’s creative work.

A. This meets the theme of material gestures that we are addressing in the magazine: learning by making creative choices, sometimes lateral to the intended aim.

P.R. Almost immediately from the plans and perspectives you can see an incredibly intelligent way of connecting the surfaces, closeness and openness. But something I learned only during the design process is that in Mies’s work there is an idea of ritual, a drama.

He sets the long canopy at the arrival of the cars, a very generous gesture, and then he blocks you with a wall, making all the energy stop; then you have to go one way or the other, and finally the space opens on the landscape. Nothing can show better than this model that Mies was working with these vertical plans like a series of theatre screens.

A. This image deals with the theatre and its ambiguous position towards the city and the viewer. We can think of full-size models such as theatre sets, or art installations, as objects of contemplation that you can walk through. It is an experience that isn’t only visual but also physical. Usually models are placed in the abstract space of the architecture studio, then photographed with a black wall behind, whereas these 1:1 models are sitespecific. What is interesting in these transformations is that sometimes models become buildings, like in Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, or sometimes buildings become models, objects, like when pictured from a plane. Their status changes. We are

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also thinking of the AUE Pavilions you designed at the 1992 Documenta in Kassel, where there is this same idea of shifting from space to contemplation, architecture to painting, and back.

P.R. I had never thought about this connection, it is remarkable: these pavilions at the Documenta were also in contact with an inaccessible landscape, to the East of the park that also looked to the East of Germany. The paintings hung inside the pavilions dialogued with this endless landscape.

I really believe that architecture is closer to painting than to sculpture. If we make a very simplistic distinction, the origin of painting is the landscape while the origin of sculpture is the human body. Mies’s architecture works with these screens that organise the progression toward the endlessness of the landscape.

p. 54 Aldo Rossi, Teatro del Mondo, Venice Biennale, 1979-1980 p. 55 top right: photo: Maximiliaan Royakkers. top left and below: Robbrecht en Daem architecten, AUE pavilions, Documenta Kassel, 1992. Photo courtesy of Kristien Daem: exterior and interior view with works by Gerhard Richter.

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As architects we work with material to construct our work. How we make things depends largely on the materials we produce for our constructions. How and in which sizes the wood is cut influences the way we make our window frames or a wooden floor, the steel profiles are at the base of our steel structures.

If we openly looked again at the source of the material and its production we could see the gestures we recognise in them as the start of a renewed approach. These gestures could redefine ways of making and constructing: what are the gestures that give shape to the environments we inhabit? What is the correlation between material and craft? What places of production do we see now, in the past and in the future?

Nowadays 3D printing is seen as one of the examples where the production of something is related to the place where and when it is needed. A shift that shortcuts material production and construction. Again, as it did in the past when houses were made out of mud on which the houses stood. Or temples were carved out of the mountains.

Material Gesture ANNE HOLTROP

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnec, An Italian Film (Africa Addio), film still, 2013.

Cy Twombly, “III Notes from Salalah, Note I”, 2005-07, Acrylic on wood panel, 243,8 x 365,8 cm.

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery and Cy Twombly Foundation, New York.

Graphic limestone (Tuscany, 254 x 236 mm), from Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985).

Koenraad Dedobbeleer, “Disruption of the anticipated future”, 2009.

Photo: Sven Laurent.

In the writings of Roland Barthes on the work of Cy Twombly, Barthes defines the term gesture as the surplus of an action. An action, he writes: “... is transitive, it seeks only to provoke an object, a result.” Whereas the gesture is “the indeterminate and inexhaustible total of reasons, pulsions, indolences which surround the action with an ‘atmosphere’.” The gesture does not necessarily bear the logic of cause and effect, as an action would do. A gesture is the production of an effect while not searching for one. In other words the gesture is something not so apparent as a causal logic, but a thing more bound to the character of a certain act and in this case to a material.

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1 Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper and The Wisdom of Art”, in The Responsibility of Forms: critical essays on music, art, and representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

Barthes describes the essence of the work of Twombly through the material. His art consists in making things that are seen – not the things he is representing. Let me rephrase Barthes argument in a reverse order to end with the surface (the canvas or paper) the work is made on: “We might observe that these gestures, which aim to establish substance as a fact, are all related to ‘dirtying’. A paradox: the fact, in its purity, is best defined by not being clean. Take an ordinary object: it is not its new, virgin state which best accounts for its essence, but its worn, lopsided, soiled, somewhat forsaken condition: the truth of objects is best read in the cast-off. The truth of red is in the smear; the pencil’s truth is in the wobbly line.” What Barthes tells us, is that when we see the material smeared, clotted and scratched we see its real character. When we see a perfectly straight black line of the pencil or a square painted red, we see form and colour and we might understand what it represents. But when the paint is smeared over the surface with its different intensities of red and different thicknesses, that is when we start to see its real substance. And Barthes relates the gestures of Twombly with the surface it is brought onto: “No surface, wherever we consider it, is a virgin surface: everything is always, already, rough, discontinuous, unequal, set in motion by some accident: there is the texture of the paper, then the stains, the hatchings, the tracery of strokes.”1 Let me make a step to broaden the view on what material gesture might be also about. In 1970 Roger Caillois wrote a book with the title L’ECRITURE DES PIERRES (The Writing of Stones). In this book he shows a collection of the inside of agate, jasper, and onyx stones. The remarkable thing in these stones is that we tend to see images in them.

One of these stones suggests a view of a typical English landscape.

Another, a bit more abstract, clearly still indicates a spatial angled structure. What fascinates me in these stones, is that we first of all see the material of the stone, and when we would be able to hold it in our hands we would feel its heaviness and we would touch its surface. Next to it, we see in the material of the stone an image of something else: a landscape, a spatial structure. Caillois writes: “Who knows whether this tumult of triangles inscribed in the stone, first brought about nature and then by art, does not contain one of the secret cyphers of the universe?”

So what ‘secret’ message of the universe is found in the stone that Caillois shows us? We could say that the image is the gesture of the stone. What could we do with its gesture? Should we construct the space it indicates in the image of the stone with the stones?

Last year I saw three times a stone in the work DISRUPTION OF THE ANTICIPATED FUTURE of the Belgian artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer.

I don’t know what Dedobbeleer’s specific intentions are with this work, but let me explain what I saw in it. The largest object is a facetted form.

It looks like an abstract natural form – in my view it looks like a stone.

Seeing it as a stone is strengthened by the surface of it, which is made with sheets of formica that again have the image of a stone. Dedobbeleer might have made this constructed stone in formica and thought it could not stand straight up or not in the way he wanted it to stand up. And for the support he needed, he used two real stones.

Let’s relate his work to material gesture. We now have an idea of what a gesture is, as described in Roland Barthes text, and we have a double view of stone as a material object and an image – in Caillois’s words a ‘writing of the stone’. In the case of Dedobbeleer’s work we see how these relate together in one work, where we see a stone, a constructed stone and an image of the surface of a stone. Three times you could see the same stone, and also three gestures bound to the stone.

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An existing house can be rebuilt from the bottom up. There is no need to abandon or demolish existing housing stock, even structures in sustandard condition in need of substantial structural repair. Erect a cross-braced bearing wall with steel headers, tie it into the foundation wall at spaced intervals, and remove the exterior sheathing. You will have transferred the live load from a compromised member; you will have assumed an irrevocable authority. Standing under the king stud, drive galvanized lag bolts into a virgin post, ratchet tight. Test by eye. A younger man may drive the spikes with a blocking sledge; pause to inspect.

An Existing House OSCAR TUAZON

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Text and photos were published in the anthology Rehabilitation, edited

by Dirk Snauwaert and Christophe Van Gerrewey (Brussels: Wiels & MER.paperkunsthalle, 2010, p.

175-184), on the occasion of the eponymous collective exhibition at Wiels, Brussels, 29 May – 15 August 2010.

Mark openings directly onto the sheetrock and trim with a long-blade saber. It may take considerable effort. Once anchored into the perimeter wall, this will act as your primary support.

Now you need to decide. Either open up the roof to allow clearance for a driver, and sink kreosoted piles; or take a borer through the topsoil and pump in 100 yards of pile. Blast through the rock if it’s brittle. If you can handle 3” crushed stone top course compacted clean, go minus with it. It comes wet enough. Jack the foundation, reinforce with four inch flat bar, peel yourself free, and flip it. Keep a copy of the bill handy and plow it back into the tennants. If the she bucks, better to break a bit than twist the drive shaft. It may not be up to code, but once she’s set, that bitch is going nowhere.

Where I come from, that’s a dozer job. Hey, the job is going to suck no matter what you do with it. You can’t run a K12 overhead, bonehead, jam a pike pole and ride a shale bar with a D handle, gravity’s your helper. Just get at it, get done with it. Strip it back to the timbers, cut the connectors, let the plaster drop in sheets, dumpster the whole load, give yourself some wiggle room under the jam, stick it and jiggle it.

Buy yourself a hole hog, shove it in the opening. While it spins, your guy is behind you with the hose, feeding it to you in increments. Go slow if you need to. The mix should stick to your bit like cooling oatmeal, and you want a good clean fill. Lean into it. Vibrate the rods, you’ll want to hold on. Compact with a sheepsfoot tamper and a plate. Start during a frost and you’ll compromise the pad. Leave bar free to tie into, wire it to your footing if you have to.

After hours in a gutted bungalow I fucked a ho.

If you feel mixed up you should try and drive a 52 Ford station wagon 50 miles an hour down the road to my house. That will set you straight to pursue the things in life that interest me Now you’re good for 40 stories. Rip out the dead wood, any sills or exposed endgrain. You’ll want to save what you can, and it isn’t unreasonable to salvage the fine-grain fir. Rip it into strips and stack it dry under the eaves, you’ll get to it when you can. Drop your posts. Strap to the pins. Hang a joist.

Set breeze blocks, fill wet, keep damp. Where needed, 40/30 fine sand mix. Brush the tar on with a three-bristle brush and cure the unholy sludge. Trim a yard of flashing for the seams, double it up and fasten with red heads. Don’t worry if she splits where you puncture a void, you’ll back it up later with quickset. I’ve actually fed a line through a plumber’s tool and told the inspector it was a water main, don’t ask me why. She fucked me.

You can see where your loads are now just by looking. Run a tape and have your boy buck the load for you, it saves time and you’ll need it. Drop a rafter down from the second story, follow whatever line you’ve got, and force it. Let that hang for awhile while you button up the roof, turn around and come back around. If you can’t afford a Cat, I’ve found that a come-along will get you half the way there. Walk the rest. If you’ve still got any windows in, you’ll want to take those out now.

She won’t drop far, but it’s enough to pop the seal, wrack the frames. Leaded glass will develop a hairline fracture, and anyway the panes are shot.

Ease into it, bring the edge down level with the king post, and adjust on the fly. Fall short and block with trim or a viscous paste if in a dry climate. Wigglewood may do it. Consider how you want the thing to look. Turn it around in the light, find the fissures, jizz into your hand and slowly spread the thing till it’s where you want it. I swear it can be done.

Once on a roof job in McMinnville I shot a three inch staple into my leg, sunk it in the femur.

Most of the blood had drained out in a ring around the wound, leaving a puffy white disk domed like a birdshell on my thigh. It was buried in there like a black tick, I could see it blinking out at me when I squeezed. I was winded and numb from the impact, standing in a thin glaze of freezing blood and piss, I slid backwards off the eaves onto the gantry, which tipped. Punctured a lung on a busted rib.

Guide yourself through the rafters, string a hemp cord, find an opening along the roofline, and punch through it where you want. Use a chain beam cutter if you can guide it; run a skew notch along the underside of a warped member and pull. I’ve found that a 1 1/2” wood owl welded directly to the drive shaft of a 13” Makell beam saw will bore an oak post in a minute. Watch for blowout if it matters to you.

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CONTRIBUTORS Jaro Straub is a visual artist living in Berlin. He studied fine arts in Berlin and Vienna (19962001) and was a visiting artist at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Los Angeles (2002-2003). His recent collage work involves a layering of information, merging found images, painting, texts, photographs and books into dense “sound” structures.

O’Point Associates. Since 2007, architect Nicolas Beullekens and technical draftsman Christian Chaidron put together their experiences to establish an innovative, bilateral approach to building measurement and data processing.

In their work they aim to create documents that can immediately be exploited by different collaborators, such as architects, engineers, public and private clients.

Simon Boudvin (1979) is an artist and a teacher at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris. His work revolves around the disruptions and the wastes of the everyday built environment, which he approaches with a scrupulous scientific interest and a varied plastic language, ranging between photography, technical drawing, sculpture and archival recollection.

Anne Holtrop (1977, The Netherlands) is an independent architect based in Amsterdam.

His work ranges from models to temporary spaces and buildings, on which he occasionally collaborates with the artists Krijn de Koning and Bas Princen. He is course director of the master Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, and was editor of OASE, an architectural journal for architecture from 2005 until 2013. For his practice he has been awarded several grants from the Fonds BKVB, as well as receiving the Charlotte Köhler Prize for Architecture from the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation.

Bas Princen (1975) is an artist and photographer living and working in Rotterdam. He studied Design for Public Space at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and Architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. In 2010 he won the Silver Lion, together with Office KGDVS, at the Venice Biennale.

Maaike Lauwaert writes on contemporary art for various magazines and blogs and works as visual arts curator at Stroom, an independent centre for art and architecture in the Netherlands.

Before starting at Stroom, she worked at the Mondriaan Foundation and completed a PhD in cultural sciences at the University of Maastricht.

Her work has been published in De Witte Raaf, A Prior, Metropolis M, Kaleidoscope, Modern Painters and Art Agenda, among others. architecten de vylder vinck taillieu – aDVVT– is the name under which Jan De Vylder, Inge Vinck and Jo Taillieu share their mutual appreciation, interest and previous realised work. Already long before, each one of them, sometimes in collaboration with each other, steadily developed and realized a certain variety of projects. Since

2009 it is clear that the establishment of aDVVT has given wings to the united view on what architecture can possibly stand for.

Robbrecht en Daem architecten was founded in 1975 by Paul Robbrecht (1950) and Hilde Daem (1950). In 2002, Johannes Robbrecht joined the practice and became partner in 2012. The office has won numerous prizes and distinctions and has been exhibited internationally. One of their work’s distinctive feature is a constant relation between their architectural designs and the visual or performing arts, whether in their designs for stage theatres, music halls as much as in their designs for scientific or technical facilities. After their participation in 1985 and 1991, the office was invited for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Common Ground”, curated by David Chipperfield. Their Market Hall and central squares of the historical centre of Ghent was selected as finalist for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2013.

Christiane Lange holds a masters degree in art history and history from University of Bonn. As a member of the German Research Foundation –"Project “Catalogue Raisonné of furniture and furniture design by Mies van der Rohe”"– she catalogs all furniture designs, realised and un-realised, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The Project is led by Wolf Tegethoff of the Zentralinstitut fuer Kunstgeschichte, Munich, Germany. Christiane is a founding member of “Projekt MIK e. V.”, Krefeld, Germany. Her research, exhibitions and movies focus on the European work of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. In 2013 she curated the exhibition “MIES 1:1 The Golf Club Project” with Robbrecht en Daem as artistic directors.

Sandro Della Noce (1982) has studied Art History at Paris-Sorbonne and has attended the School of Fine Arts of Marseille, his home town.

Graduated in 2008, he was granted a permanent residency at the Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille.

In 2011 he was awarded the Art-O-Rama prize at the International Art Fair of Marseille. Since 2012 he lives and works in Brussels.

Guillaume Gattier (1982) trained as a carpenter before entering almost by chance the School of Fine Arts of his home town. Unwilling to achieve anything, he quit school after obtaining a scholarship which brought him to New York in 2007, then in Berlin (2008). Since 2009 he has been living and working in Marseille.

Gilles Pourtier (1980) has studied Modern Literature. He was then trained as a glass-maker at the European Research and Training Glass Centre in Nancy (CERFAV), which brought him to work for four years in London. Graduated from the School of Photography of Arles (ENSP) in 2009, he lives and works in Marseille.

Cyrielle Lefebvre (1987) graduated from ParisMalaquais School of Architecture in 2011. She has worked for several offices, and volunteered for several international building sites, notably in Nepal. Today she is creating a collective for participative architecture in Paris.

Oscar Tuazon (1975, Tacoma, Washington) lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, before working for artist Vito Acconci in his architecture studio. Until 2007, he was based in Paris where he co-founded the collectiverun artists’ gallery castillo/corrales. In 2011, he designed one of the four para-pavilions at the 54th Venice Biennial. Comprised of a combination of natural and industrial materials, the sculptures and installations of Oscar Tuazon reference minimalist sensibilities, extreme do-ityourself aesthetics and vernacular architecture.

Sara Cremer & Carlo Goncalves (1982-1980) graduated from La Cambre in Brussels and Paris Malaquais (2009 and 2007). They are now ParisBrussels based architects and teachers at ULB Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta. They have just started to draw together. Their drawings and collages reflect future territories in their physical and imaginary forms.

Biannual magazine on architecture Issue 1, Mars 2014 Contact: Accattone c/o Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon Rue d’Artois 52, B-1000 BRUSSELS info@accattone.be www.accattone.be Editors: Sophie Dars Carlo Menon Graphic design: Überknackig Ismaël Bennani & Orfée Grandhomme www.uberknackig.com Translations and proofreading: Isabelle Jusseaume Carlo Menon Printed by New Goff, Gent, Belgium ISSN 2295-6255 14€

© the editors of Accattone and the featured authors.

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The editors have been careful to contact all copyright holders of the illustrations appearing in this issue. If you claim ownership of any of the illustrations and have not been properly credited, please contact us and we will be happy to print a formal acknowledgement in the next issue.