After developing a strategy to urbanise the existing heritage area of Sharjah during the biennial, OFFICE created a set of pavilions, which both through their volumetric presence complete the city fabric, as they create small gardens for the neighbourhood. The architecture is both open and specific, providing a framework for the quickly evolving media of today, tomorrow and in twenty years.The new building for RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse) is positioned in the heart of the double campus of EPFL and UNIL. Photovoltaic panels will provide thermic and electrical energy, which will be stocked in buffer tanks.
It has however an ambiguous relationship with self expression, torn between its own technical content and its ceremonial character. The project forms a complex piece of city where every building has its own characteristics while sharing a common language. The project is a simple and spartan box, demonstrating a refined use of standard industrial building elements, such as prefabricated concrete walls, aluminium cladding and cupboard-like office spaces. The spatial set up of the museum can enhance the ways how the museum can perform this discursivity. In the new walled garden of the pavilion one can sit in the sun or under the shade of trees. With a simple intervention the former ammunition storage became Garden Pavilion.Winner of the Silver Lion for Promising Young ParticipantThis project was the winning proposal in a competition for the organisation of the Ghent University architecture library in an existing physics hall in the heart of the ’Jozef Plateau’ building, a labyrinthine, 19th century university block. This ambition requires a specific urban and constructive approach. Photographs: Bas Princen. This promenade supplements a public path to the level of the park which lies behind the buildings. Winner of the Belgian Prize for Architecture 2015.When a theater company requested scenery for an outside play called “The Wall” quickly it became clear that both the specificity of the play and the choice of site was forcing some more interesting decisions. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.International Competition 1st prize.
In cooperation with Bollinger + Grohmann (Stability Studies)Curated together with Giovanni Borasi and in collaboration with Go Hasegawa Associates, the exhibition ’Besides, History: Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, David Van Severen’ questions what role history can play in a contemporary architecture practice. Project in collaboration with Joachim Declerck & Bureau Goddeeris. As Bruegel depicts the ambiguity of our notions of nature and artificiality, with leaves visually mutating into red bricks, the pavilion aims for the same, as a 1:1 scale model of a tower.This is a house for a family with two young children, one of whom uses a wheelchair. The representative façade on the street side, completely of glass, displays the organisation’s operations like a billboard in a giant concrete cabinet. Coated with mirrored panels, they reflect the facades of both the Forum building and Parliament.
Nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe Award 2014.In 2010 Kazuo Sejima invited Piet Oudolf to design a beautiful garden at the very end of the Arsenale area of the Venice Biennale. The new Belgian pavilion frames and displays the original pavilion, a piece of architecture that has been constantly adapted and transformed over the years.Belgian Pavilion for the Venice Bienneal of Architecture 2008. Under the tower, a large outdoor space opens towards the street anew, defining a new public interface for the complex: a room for Yale Union.The Citroën showroom and workshop form an urban island which dominates the north of the ring road adjacent to the canal in Brussels (BE). These new constructions slip gently in the existing voids, remaining at close distance, and thus allow visual connection from the city towards the garden. In OFFICE’s building, large cantilevered balconies break up the static, rigorous facade and reference the warehouse typology with projections reaching out towards the water.
Inside the contain floors of different heights, and create a stepped working environment, central to the building.
Structurally, the bridge can be described as a stiff disc, the roof, on which the floor hangs with a minimal presence of structure: a near ephemeral pavilion between the buildings. These are directed at the still open, rural landscape, while the neighbouring houses remain relatively invisible. First the entrance area was extended to connect the street with the atrium and garage. Each of the fixed elements in the room is an actor in the composition, carefully designed to live together with the residents and furniture.Winner of the Belgian prize for Architecture & Energy 2013, residential categoryDesign by invitation of Herzog & De Meuron.