Accattone #4 (preview)

Masks

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FRIDA ESCOBEDO

Museo Nacional de Antropología

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KRISTIEN DAEM

Villa T.D. Villa V.B.R.

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IŠTVAN IŠT HUZJAN

Museum of Mistakes

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PIERRE LEGUILLON FABRICE SCHNEIDER

Strata

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51N4E STEFANO GRAZIANI

The Pale Fox

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CAMILLE HENROT

Palimpsest

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PHILIPPE BRAQUENIER

Facade Mock-Ups

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XAVEER DE GEYTER ARCHITECTS MICHEL DESVIGNE 51N4E CAB BRUTHER

Atelierhaus Weissacher

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PETER MÄRKLI ARCHITECTURE RESEARCH UNIT

Laguna, Islands, Deserts and Archaism CÉDRIC LIBERT

New Rituals New Ruins FREEK PERSYN

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YOU KNOW, YOU CANNOT SEE YOURSELF SO WELL AS BY REFLECTION

The title of the installation – which is a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – is in reference to both the literal reflectivity of the platforms and the work’s philosophical inspiration.

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON, SUMMER 2015

A pavilion is a temporary structure or prosthesis that “changes the face” of a particular place, just like a mask. According to one of our most prominent poets, Octavio Paz, a mask is the threshold between the other and me, between who I am and everything that I am not. By contrast and juxtaposition, a mask makes its own otherness evident.

Nevertheless, when it hides this otherness, it does so in a way of synthesis and stratification: a new layer unfolds into the previous one, building a new narrative. This process can help to explain how identity – which is often thought of as being innate or natural – is actually continuously revisited and reinvented.

By overlapping two very different topographies and ideologies, new discussions on place and identity are raised. A series of mirrored platforms act as a liminal zone that, on one hand, occupies and appropriates John Madejski Garden and on the other reflects the V&A building that encloses the garden, blending in with its surroundings. In Lacanian terms, this surface could act as a ‘mirror stage’ to illustrate the conflicting nature between how we imagine ourselves, how we project ourselves, and how others perceive us.

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Gabriel Orozco, From Roof to Roof, 1993

The platforms are laid out in a grid pattern, referencing one of Mexico’s most emblematic territorializations: The Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, erected on a lake in the early 14th century. The channels, streets and ‘chinampas’ of the early city can still be recognized in today’s urban structure.

Mexico City’s fragmented and stratified nature does not hold on to the past, but instead is based in what is still alive or capable of staying alive in the everyday life.

The city materializes the continuous flow of additions, subtractions and reorganizations of social life and collective identity.

Map of Tenochtitlan. Mural painting from the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, painted in 1930 by Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo)

And that was when – in a fortunate time of wonder – after crossing the snowy volcanoes, Cortez’s men looked upon that orb of sound and brilliance – a spacious circus made of mountains.

At their feet – in a mirage of crystals – the picturesque city stretched, all of it arose from the temple as its beaming streets prolonged the pyramid’s edges.

Alfonso Reyes, Visión de Anáhuac (1519), Madrid, 1923

Cortes’ Map of Tenochtilan, 1524, wood engraving, Newberry Library, Chicago

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Three recent experiences have suggested this direction. The first is Camille Henrot’s video piece Grosse Fatigue, which collapses a whole history of mankind in only 13 minutes of desktop computing; the manipulation of fragments – myths, songs, objects, nature – has rarely been so powerful. The second is Thomas Demand’s installation Processo Grottesco, where an artificial cave is shaped out of a collection of all the caves in history of mankind, mostly in postcard format. The third experience is a trip to Mexico City, where a visit to the Museum of Anthropology and the encounter of Frida Escobedo triggered some of the architectural themes presented here.

Without being reductive, each contribution reveals a particular take on collecting combined with a reflection on time: the collection is activated, put in movement, performed. This displacement, always conceptual, can simply be a displacement of the viewing subject, as Kristien Daem’s lateral viewpoint adopted for her pictures of exhibition devices at the museum of anthropology. It is sometimes a truly physical displacement, as Ištvan Išt Huzjan’s intervention to exhibit a private art collection at the neighbour’s house. Or it can be a displacement of meaning and purpose, as in Pierre Leguillon’s Museum of Mistakes and Camille Henrot’s exhibitions. Displacement is also performed in architectural terms, as is the case with 51N4E’s symbolic projects in Albania, Frida Escobedo’s pavilions made to be altered by the people, and Peter Märkli’s ‘changeful’ house for two performers.

Perversion is the alteration of the original sense of things: the perverse museographer – be it architect, artist, photographer – challenges the codes of a collection, or creates a new collection out of the ‘failures’ of the institutionalised ones. This results in a mix of estrangement and kinship that come and haunt the relationships between all the items in the collection. To do so, the museographer doesn’t follow any secured knowledge. He or she proceeds by empirical attempts, aiming to question the order of things rather than reinforce established narratives.

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1 Such methods can be traced back to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918–20) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), where ancient literature, mythology, spoken language, minor histories and ‘modern life’ are condensed into a single text.

Roger Caillois’s The Writing of Stones (1970), pp. 120–121

Accattone #4 stems from the idea of collection to explore mythical methods and visual ethnographies in contemporary practices, with an interest in the compression into a single artefact of long ages of history, power relationships, memories and everyday experience.1

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A typology of formlessness: Thomas Demand’s Processo Grottesco, permanent installation at the Fondazione Prada Milano, 2015. Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Courtesy Fondazione Prada

2 The series of fifteen issues in two volumes has been reprinted by Jean-Michel Place (Paris, 1991), with an introduction by Denis Hollier. Partial English translations can be found in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Alastair Brotchie ed. (London: Atlas Press, 1995).

See also Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, L’Informe.

Mode d’Emploi (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996, transl.

Formless: A User’s Manual, New York: Zone Books, 1997).

Two main methods can be identified from the contributions: to collapse the collection in order to produce a clash of meanings, or to spatialize the relationships in a constellation of concepts and physical objects in tension with each other. In the continuous construction and deconstruction of the collection, science and myth, personal intent and conditions ‘as found’, otherness and domesticity are equally important and placed on the same operative level. A certain French cultural climate in the twentieth century produced a few antecedents which also informed the preparation of the issue.

3 As expressed in the curatorial statement of the exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris, fields include “bio-genetics and visual arts, architecture and astrophysics, music and food, physics and clothing, a maze of language machines, habitats and photography, industry and law.

Kilometres of invisible wiring.

And our big questions: reality, matter, materials, grids of meaning, and who is their author.”

George Bataille’s magazine Documents (1929–30) bound together ethnographic essays and art criticism; the blend of genres produced unexpected encounters of content, fostering the idea of a ‘savage thinking’ of modernity. Roger Caillois’s obsession for stones, culminated in the book The Writing of Stones (1970), intertwined geology and iconography to figure out new aesthetic possibilities out of the archaic nature of minerals. For Bataille and Caillois, both form and formlessness are necessary conditions of culture.2 The third antecedent is Jean-François Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux (1985), which extended the notion of exhibit to the widest range of scientific and intellectual fields, facilitated by electronic media.3 The overall editorial take of Accattone is similar to these methods: to put together and condense a collection of contents around a few themes. This attempt is at stake within each issue, first, but extends throughout the issues published so far. Ideas expressed in footnotes are sometimes expanded in subsequent issues as new ideas or material emerge, following opportunities and not a pre-established plan. Artists and architects are invited to display their work – be it a built project, a text or a series of images – in a way that embeds and expresses the method used to produce it, to the point that methods and contents tend to coincide. This makes most of the contributions site-specific to the space of the magazine.

Carlo Menon and Sophie Dars

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A visit to the National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City.

Beyond fascination, Kristien Daem’s take on the museum questions the status of representation in the unrestrained confrontation of exhibit and display. Ruin or replica? Sculpture or pedestal?

Space or model? Original or genuinely factitious?

Museo Nacional de AntropologĂ­a KRISTIEN DAEM

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These pictures and texts follow a day-long visit to the Museum of Mistakes, where Pierre Leguillon unpacks and ‘performs’ his collections. The museum is presently located in his own apartment, 90 m2 on the first floor of an industrial building in central Brussels.

Pierre Leguillon moved here from Paris, where he started being engaged with collecting – mostly books and images – around 1994.

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Pierre Leguillon, Prelinger Drawing (with Pergola), 2011–2015, graphite on paper, 64x97 cm, bamboo, Japanese fabric.

Museum of Mistakes PIERRE LEGUILLON PHOTOS: FABRICE SCHNEIDER

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FRIEDMAN AND HAUSSMANN As an artist, Pierre Leguillon collects all sorts of things, none of which has any particular value on the market. The visit starts with him suddenly leaving the table to take out of the kitchen drawers an A4-sized box containing his collection of wedges – five or six in total, no need for more – in response to a conversation on minor architecture which we raised by unfolding Accattone #3 and explaining Sébastien Martinez Barat and Benjamin Lafore’s approach. We all agree that minor interventions on the interior can alter the codes of architecture. He recalls his experience of Yona Friedman’s apartment in 2003: “Haussmann’s architecture can be broken down simply by placing and displacing objects, books, plastic bags, foam, diagonals.”1 Despite this domestic power, Leguillon left Paris precisely because its architecture, as a mindset, is too rigid for the Museum of Mistakes. The disorderly beauty of Brussels offers more ambiguity and interplay.

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Alighiero Boetti, Da uno a dieci (Milan: Emme, 1980). Portfolio with two series of ten boards with increasing numbers and colours, 26x38 cm. Background: Enzo Mari’s plastic puzzle Sedici animali (Milan: Danese, 1957), 24x34 cm.

1 Camille Henrot was also fascinated

by Friedman’s “whole world enclosed in an apartment”, which she portrayed in her book Reception / Transmission (Paris: kamel mennour, 2006). The book is made out of material produced in preparation of a video documentary that never took place.

The Museum’s socks collection out of the plan chest.

VERONICA AND MARILYN From wedges the visit glides to door handles. This collection is not sorted in a box: Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus handle is fitted to the bedroom door; Ludwig Wittgenstein’s one has not yet been purchased, but is reproduced in a book promptly extracted from the library; a handle by Jean Prouvé was collected in Luxembourg from a building being dismantled – the workers sawed it out of a steel door with a blowtorch after he had convinced them that he was a relation of Prouvé in search of a souvenir. Few other objects are three-dimensional, but most of the museum’s collection is printed matter: paperbacks and artists’ books, postcards, Xerox copies, Internet printouts, press clippings (of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans photographs), exhibition posters, photographs. Reproduction enables manipulation and displacement: a painting of Saint Veronica and a picture of Marilyn Monroe can be compared once both have become postcards.

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Transcript of conversations held with Freek Persyn and Galaad Van Daele in Spring 2016, based on a series of documents from 51N4E’s projects in Albania and a photo report by Stefano Graziani.

The built environment can be read as a constant process of sedimentation, erosion and disruption caused by political turmoil, cultural shifts and sometimes architectural projects. After meeting Frida Escobedo in Mexico City, many parallels appeared with the work of Belgian architects 51N4E in Albania, to the point that both contributions could be read as an attempt to consider contemporary architecture in its close relation to the atavistic rituals and symbolic meanings embedded in everyday life: entrance, soil, threshold, representation of power, celebration, exclusion.

Since 2004, 51N4E have been digging in Tirana’s most sensitive sites: the main square, a central tower, the prime minister’s cabinet, tombs and memorials. Tangible histories of mock-ups, reinforced ceilings, domes and collections of stones appeal to broader architectural themes: the tensions between domesticity and display, technocracy and participation, desire and matter, design and uncertainty.

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Previous spread: TID Tower and Skanderbeg Square under construction, photo: Filip Dujardin, May 2011

Strata 51N4E

ACCATTONE What is compelling about your projects is the way in which you seem to grasp the political, even existential aspects of a building project with the simple means of architecture. A necessary cynicism on the present state of the discipline – Koolhaas’s ‘dirty realism’ – is counterweighed by an almost heroic belief in architecture’s capacity to make things better.

Your architecture is not made in isolation.

Indeed you seem to find a particular impulse in approaching difficult programmes with as many stakeholders, while most architects would prefer more comfortable situations. In your case, architectural forms and materials are always invested with a lot of content. Yet they don’t spring from objective or measurable elements of the programme. Instead they appeal to something beyond, creating a disconnection, an intensity. A momentary lapse of reason. To define it as a contextual approach would be reductive, since form is specific to but also independent from the programme. Likewise your role in the building process: you strongly hold the position of the architect, but you push the boundaries to become a producer, to involve and get involved with all the actors of the process.

It has been twelve years since your experience in Albania began, with the TID Tower competition in 2004. There you found – and contributed to improve – particular conditions which seem so far from countries with a longer tradition in project management.

Running a project in Tirana definitely seems like a collective project made by the manual and intellectual efforts of many people.

Human technology rather than material.

Celebrations in the basement for the completion of TID Tower, October 2015

FREEK PERSYN What’s striking about working there is this tension within a highly collective country which became completely individualistic.

We were lucky to encounter someone like Edi Rama, first the mayor of Tirana, now the prime minister, who had the very clear agenda to bring back the idea of a collective space – although the definition of that word needs to be reconsidered, especially in Albania. And even if we cannot define the meaning of it precisely, the collective is actually something in which we have been intuitively interested for a long time, the idea that you share something with other people.

Many of our projects deal with this ambiguity between public and private. Albania is a country which expresses this ambiguity most intensely. It has it culturally because of its Mediterranean tradition, where people really use the public space as a social space. Even if society is becoming more individualistic, this type of behaviour is still very strong in Albania, where people go out just to meet one another. So this transition towards individualism hasn’t broken that other tradition of sharing space. On top of this there is also the broader political tension, because of the Eastern bloc legacy, which was a very radical way of thinking about society and the relation between public and private. As Edi Rama describes it, people went “from a time when everything was ours, to a time when everything is mine”. The ambiguity and tension come from the fact that none of these absolutes is possible of course.

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Grotte Chauvet – Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France – 28/08/02015 The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche department in the south of France is a cave that contains the earliest known and best-preserved figurative cave paintings in the world, approximately 32,000–30,000 BP, as well as other evidence of Upper Palaeolithic life. Discovered on 18 December 01994, it is considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites. The UN’s cultural agency UNESCO granted it World Heritage status on 22 June 02014.

The cave has been virtually sealed off to the public since its discovery. Access is severely restricted owing to the experience with decorated caves found in the twentieth century such as Lascaux, where the admission of visitors on a large scale led to the appearance of mould on the walls that damaged the wall paintings.

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Pionen Data Centre – Stockholm, Sweden – 04/11/02014 Pionen is a former civil defence centre built in the White Mountains SÜdermalm borough of Stockholm in the 01970s to protect essential government functions in the event of a nuclear strike. It was converted into a data centre by the Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof. As the facility is buried in a mountain under 30 metres of granite, secured by a 40-centimetre-thick door, and only reachable by a single entrance tunnel, the data centre is capable of withstanding a hydrogen bomb. The inside features fountains, greenhouses, simulated daylight and a huge saltwater fish tank. In 02010, Wikileaks chose to be hosted by Pionen. It has now opted for multiple servers in the cloud to optimize its safety. The cloud helps to give a more ethereal and untraceable side to that information.

Mankind is losing memory.

In a full phase of digital intoxication, where technology must solve all the problems, we have to face the facts: digital technology is not the solution but a new issue to resolve. It is paradoxical that at a time when humanity is creating and storing immeasurable quantities of information, it has never used techniques that are as unstable and as precarious to record its data.

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ENSAE, CAB architects, 10 July 2015

Facade Mock-Ups

XAVEER DE GEYTER ARCHITECTS, FLORIS ALKEMADE, MICHEL DESVIGNE PAYSAGISTE WITH 51N4E, CAB, BARTHÉLÉMY-GRINO

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Several pieces in this issue originate from an interest in mock-ups as free-standing objects in the transient reality of the building site. Their status is ambiguous, suspended as they are between autonomy and representation. Design process and construction intertwine.

Building materials and apparatuses combine with placeholders, wedges and props.

Framing a mock-up – what’s ‘in’, what’s ‘out’ – is like making cut-outs from a newspaper: the tension is shifted onto the borders. Indeed, absence plays a most important role, as the mock-up calls on the imagination to complete its fragmentary nature. Mock-ups thus possess some of the evocative power of ruins. But they are also down-to-earth testing grounds, contractual puppets and social constructs – sites of exchange and negotiation between builders, architects, clients and engineers. They respond to very different scopes, from politics to landscape, beauty, finance, waterproofing.

Bruther’s photograph was the first ‘totem’ to call attention to facade mock-ups and suggest to expand on the subject. 51N4E’s one for TID Tower in Tirana rapidly followed, showing different roles of the mock-up within the project. Evidence of a ‘facade cemetery’ on the Macdonalds building site in Paris was then asked to XDGA, who literally performed a digital archaeology in their servers to relocate a few documents. One project led to another: XDGA and their partners had requested facade mock-ups for each building of Paris-Saclay, a new town made up of public and private research centres. Exploring such a complex project of urban planning, landscaping and architecture through the infinitesimal means of the mock-up is certainly reductive, but the texts written by some of the participants suggest that even at such a large scale mock-ups helped to prefigure what today – in 51N4E’s words – is still a boulevard sans ville.

SACLAY Paris-Saclay, 30 minutes south of Paris, accommodates about 20 per cent of French public and corporate R&D in the region’s last large agricultural plateau. Being part of the Grand Paris, it is on the brink of becoming one of the most promising scientific and technological clusters in Europe. Architects Xaveer De Geyter and Floris Alkemade, along with leading landscape architect Michel Desvigne, are involved in the multiple scales of the project. Since 2009 the team has established a territorial strategy for an area that is three times larger than Paris and designed the campus-city master plan, and is currently implementing one of its districts.

The ambition is not to urbanize the plateau but to invent an appropriate response to an unprecedented situation: out of the existing but isolated late-modernist buildings, the project seeks to create dense and compact urban forms encouraging interactions. Today, the territory’s unity is fragile. Only its geography is obvious: hills alternate with tree-filled glens and open plateaus. On the territorial scale, the

first project area is an 8-km-long city-campus.

The implemented proposal is to develop a new kind of city, alternating compact pedestrian districts with utilitarian landscapes. The master plan, on one hand, continues the grid pattern initiated by Auguste Perret in his ‘Atomic little Versailles’ research centre, and on the other it connects old and new property developments with a string of monumental public spaces.

This sequence of several 1-km-long public spaces constitutes at once the representative address for all main programmes and the backbone for the city’s development, being served by all kinds of transports, including a new metro line. Public space is characterized by a diverse landscape composed of urban, infrastructural and even vast architectural elements, such as parks, axes, bridges or newly created passages through existing buildings.

Time management is an essential component of the transformation process. To avoid becoming an endless construction site, the project makes use of a gradually evolving artificial landscape, an ecological engineering that anticipates the different limits and public spaces.

XDGA, FAA, MDP

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108 The mock-up cemetery, various facade mock-ups facing Macdonald warehouse, photos: FAA / XDGA, 31 January 2013

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It feels like the house could easily be altered tomorrow without any loss of character. There is a loose and relaxed construction that looks effortless. On closer inspection it is extremely thoughtful and precise. One has the impression that this house is either still under construction, or it is partially in the process of demolition.

On the exterior, several wall segments are constructed in fair faced in-situ concrete in a form that appears like large rectangular stone blocks stacked on top of each other with irregular sides that will be keyed into another masonry wall in the future.

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Emilio Ambasz, Man Is an Island, 1983.

EMILIO’S FOLLY Roughly at the same time, thanks to Sébastien Martinez Barat and Benjamin Lafore, I came across the book Follies: Architecture for the Late-Twentieth-Century Landscape. It is the catalogue of an exhibition held in 1983 at the Leo Castelli gallery in NYC and curated by BJ Archer. Among some twenty proposals of pavilions (including Hans Hollein, Peter Cook, Frank Gehry, Joseph Rykwert and the young Bernard Tschumi) was one by Emilio Ambasz entitled Man Is an Island.

Both an auto-fictional and poetic dérive, the project is a precise isolated cut-out in the ‘fertile plains of Texas or the province of Buenos Aires’. Based on a square plan, the architect designed a buried house whose architectural components draw inspiration from the morphology of a cloister. One can only access the house by walking down a monumental staircase, then using a small boat to cross a water basin with a rock at its centre (inside the rock is a grotto, which can also be navigated). Through the architectural components that he gathers in a single proposal, Ambasz brings together the fundamental elements of his own mythology (the buried house, the rainbow) as well as universal archetypes (the lemon tree, the water, the grotto), and gives shape to his prophecy: “I sometimes fancy myself to be the last man of the present culture … designing the house for the first man of a new culture.”

Sophisticated and rudimentary all at once, Man Is an Island – a house or a tale, who knows?

– is encompassed within the long history of mankind trying to define its own place on earth: within, but slightly off the world.

Man Is an Island No, I never thought about it in words.

It came to me as a full-fledged, irreducible image, like a vision.

I fancied myself the owner of a wide grazing field, somewhere in the fertile plains of Texas or the province of Buenos Aires. In the middle of this field was a partly sunken, open-air construction. I felt as if this place had always existed. Its entrance was marked by a baldachine, held up by three columns, which in turn supported a lemon tree. From the entrance, a triangular earthen plane stepped gently toward the diagonal of a large, sunken square courtyard which was half earth, half water. From the center of the courtyard rose a rocky mass that resembled a mountain. On the water floated a barge made of logs, sheltered by a thatched roof and supported by wooded trusses that rested on four square-sectioned, wooden pillars.

With the aid of a long pole the barge could be sculled into an opening in the mountain.

Once inside this cave, one could land the barge on cove-like shore illuminated by a zenithal opening. More often, I used the barge to reach an L-shaped cloister where I could read, draw, or just think, sheltered from the wind and sun. The cloister was defined on the

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Accattone #4 draws on the idea of collection to explore mythical methods and visual ethnographies in contemporary practices, with an interest in the compression, into a single artefact, of long periods of history, power relations, memories and everyday experience. It features anthropology museums, underground data centres and minor collections performed in private houses, doublesided masks and architectural strata in a floor slab or a facade, totemic mock-ups on a 1:1 scale and metaphors in the desert.

CONTRIBUTORS Frida Escobedo founded her practice in 2006. Her projects operate within a theoretical framework that addresses time not as a historical calibration but rather as a social operation, stemming directly from Henri Bergson’s notion of ‘social time’. By these measures of practice and thought, social time unfolds across multiple subjects at multiple speeds and modes of duration.

In 2015–16 she was visiting professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Camille Henrot lives and works in New York. Henrot’s diverse practice moves seamlessly between film, drawing, and sculpture. Drawing from her wide-ranging research into subjects and disciplines including literature, mythology, cinema, anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion and history, Henrot’s work acutely reconsiders the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge.

Philippe Braquenier is a Belgian freelance photographer.

After working on societal issues such as the concept of territory, collective memory, or the fear of violence, he dedicated his first long-term project on the storage of knowledge. Part of this project was exhibited in 2015 at Kristien Daem documents art and the architecture the Aperture Foundation, New York. around it, the displays and other exhibition artefacts, since the 1980s. Kristien also works together with other Bruther was founded in 2007 by Stéphanie Bru and artists during the production of their projects, and she Alexandre Theriot. Expanding into the realm of has photographed many buildings by many architects. architecture, research, urbanism and landscape, their She lives in Brussels. projects are based on the conviction that architecture happens when all the unnecessary is gotten rid of. They Ištvan Išt Huzjan graduated from the Accademia di are thought as infrastructures able to answer a large belle arti di Venezia in 2005. After a residency at the malleability of uses – because nowadays, the moral duty Rijksakademie in 2008–09 he cofounded the artist of adaptability is the only valuable programme. collective Project Goleb in Amsterdam. He was awarded the Fernand Baudin prize in Belgium in 2013 and the XDGA is an internationally oriented office founded in Grand Prize of the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts in Brussels by Xaveer De Geyter, practising architecture, Ljubljana in 2015. He lives and works between Ljubljana urbanism and landscape design on different scales and and Brussels, where he runs an exhibition space called levels. During the twenty years of its existence XDGA Coffre Fort together with Gregoire Motte and Thibaut has participated in a large number of international Espiau. competitions allowing the office to build up a portfolio illustrating its approach in architecture and urbanism.

Pierre Leguillon lives and works in Brussels. His works, Today the office numbers 50 collaborators of 11 different performances and projections have been the subject nationalities and has offices in Brussels and Paris. of many monographic presentations, notably at Wiels (Brussels, 2015) and Mrac (Sérignan, France, 2015), Dia Michel Desvigne Paysagiste (MDP) is internationally Foundation (New York, 2015), Carnegie Museum of Art renowned for his rigorous and contemporary work (Pittsburgh, 2014), Raven Row (London, 2011), Mamco that covers many different fields: from public squares (Geneva, 2010), Moderna Museet (Malmö, 2010), Musée and gardens to large scale landscape strategy and du Louvre (Paris, 2009), and Artists Space (New York, city planning. The Paris-based office has developed 2009). He was laureate of the Villa Medici in Rome in projects in 27 countries, in regular collaboration with 2003. Leguillon teaches at HEAD-Genève, Switzerland. international architects as Norman Foster, Herzog & de Meuron, Richard Rogers, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano.

Fabrice Schneider is a photographer and independent MDP was awarded European Prize for urban public book maker based in Brussels. He studied photography space 2014, and French national Urbanism Grand Prize and visual communication at ECAL, Switzerland. He’s in 2011. currently resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

CAB Architects (Jean-Patrice Calori, Bita Azimi & Marc Botineau) participate in many competitions in 51N4E is an international Brussels-based practice, France and abroad. Attentive to uses and programmes, founded in 2000, that aspires to contribute through means they have realised several public and housing projects, of design to social and urban transformation. The office and work on a regular basis on urban studies. is led by Johan Anrys and Freek Persyn and is at present 30 people strong. 51N4E envisions transformations in Peter Märkli was born in Zurich in 1953. After diploma, society through the production of space by rethinking read architecture at the ETH Zurich. Associates from built environments and outdated urban systems, but also university days include Rudolf Olgiati, architect, and by reimagining how we use those environments in all Hans Josephsohn, sculptor. Own studio in Zurich since their complexity.

1978. Professor in Design at ETH Zurich from 2002 to 2015.

Stefano Graziani is a photographer. He is founder of San Rocco and Genda magazines. Among his publications, Florian Beigel is Director of the Architecture Research Nature Morte, Fictions and Excerpts, texts by Pier Unit (ARU) at London Metropolitan University, a Paolo Tamburelli and Nanni Cagnone, How Things pioneer in the practice of ‘design as research’ generating Meet, with Falma Fshazi and 51N4E, Kunst Museum concepts of space in live building and urban design Basel, Neubau, Christ&Gantenbein Architects, AP164 projects. He was awarded the Grosse Kunstpreis für Abalos&Herreros, Fruits and Fireworks.

Baukunst 2013 (Grand Art Prize for Building Art) by

the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and the Annie Spink Award 2014 for Excellence in Architectural Education from the RIBA. Philip Christou is Co-Director of the ARU at London Metropolitan University, and teaches together with Florian Beigel at the CASS. Architectural design research, practice and teaching are given equal emphasis in this work. He has co-authored with Beigel many essays in international journals, architectural exhibitions and several books.

Cédric Libert is a Belgian architect living in Brussels and Paris. Graduated from the AA School, London, he practices independently and leads experimental research through writing, teaching and curating. He contributed to the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice, curated Detour 2013 in Hong Kong and presented À toutes fins utiles within the exhibition Auguste Perret: Huit Chefs d’œuvre !/?. He is currently teaching at ENSA Versailles.

He is founding member of Fondazione Prada’s Thought Council alongside Shumon Basar and Nicholas Cullinan.

Magazine on architecture Issue 4, August 2016 Editors: Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon Designers: Ismaël Bennani & Orfée Grandhomme Copy-editing: Patrick Lennon Sponsors: Pierres et Marbres de Wallonie, Lochten & Germeau, Maniera, Van Den Weghe, Deborah Bowmann Special thanks: Cleo Brun, Pierre Burquel, Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Marie Coulon, Laurence Degoudenne, Tania Garduño, Roxane Legrelle, Antoine Meyer, Erica Overmeer, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Francesco Saraò, Michel Sirkoski, Sam Steverlynck, Frank Tuytschaever, Galaad Van Daele, Jurgen Vergotte Accattone asbl/vzw Rue d’Artois 52, B-1000 Brussels info@accattone.be www.accattone.be Printed in Belgium by SNEL ISSN 2295-6255 04 9 772295

625008

20€

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