This is the first overview of the recent work of Francesca Torzo, illustrating a written and expanded version of a lecture she delivered at the 2022 Mies van der Rohe Award ceremony in Barcelona. The book includes a Q&A with Ellis Woodman and Elizabeth Hatz. Its title is taken from Pier Luigi Nervi’s book Costruire correttamente (Milan: Hoepli, 1955) and offers a privileged insight in the conceptual framework of her built work.

Keeping up the tension between exhibition catalogue and monograph, Impasse des Lilas explores the interweaving of theories, personal histories, objects and projects that define the architectural practice of MBL.

MBL is an architecture studio founded by Sébastien Martinez-Barat and Benjamin Lafore, later joined by Florian Jomain. Their work explores various fields of architectural culture through buildings, publications, teaching, object design and curating. MBL is committed to a practice of architecture as an investigation and an eclectic production.

Published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition commissioned by arc en rêve centre d'architecture, Bordeaux, 19 May – 18 Sept 2022.

Additional financing was contributed through the generous contribution of APSYS (Paris).

Benjamin et le Petit Pierre, deux cousins agents de quartier, patrouillent dans Vitrival en écoutant Radio Chevauchoir. Ils ont fort à faire: des graffitis de bites pullulent sur les murs du village, et personne n’a rien vu. Au même moment, c’est un habitant suicidé qu’on enterre… puis deux, puis trois.
Saison après saison, tandis qu’un tambour fait du tapage, les graffitis continuent, les suicides aussi. Que peuvent faire Pierre et Benjamin? Cela n’empêchera pas les jours et les fêtes de continuer leur cours.

Benjamin and Little Pierre, cousins and local policemen, patrol Vitrival while listening to Radio Chevauchoir. They have a lot to do: dick graffitis are popping up on the village walls. Of course, no one has seen or heard anything. At the same time, one villager commits suicide, then two, then three.
Season after season, dick graffitis and suicides proliferate. What can Benjamin and Pierre do about it? Days and celebrations will keep flowing, no matter what.

Première et troisième parties de La Trilogie de la chicorée, l'ouvrage Witloof & Witty constitue un livret-partition en deux parties tête-bêche, venant compléter le premier drame lyrique de Grégoire Motte et Gabriel Mattei, Blanche Endive.
La pièce musicale Witloof prend pour motif principal l'apparition mythique de la première endive, dans une cave sombre, en pleine révolution belge de 1830 et le ravissement du paysan qui la découvre. Witty conclut cette épopée historique et fantaisiste par le crash d'un avion américain dans un champ d'endive en Belgique flamande en 1961. Subsiste « la lyrique », l'essence poétique des êtres et des objets dans l'effervescence de la société industrielle occidentale.
Witloof (de « blanche feuille » en flamand, désignant une endive) et Witty (le diminutif affectueux de « witloof ») sont composées pour une instrumentation très inattendue offrant une grande place à l'art vocal.
Le livre contient les textes (récits, chansons et notes d'interprétations) de Grégoire Motte, les partitions de l'ouverture et des chants de Gabriel Mattei, et un texte d'analyse de l'œuvre par le curateur et critique d'art Damien Airault.

In 2012, Francesca Torzo won the international competition for the renovation and extension of Z33 House for Contemporary Art Design and Architecture in Hasselt, completed in 2020. The book features an extensive archive of sketches, models, site photographs, execution drawings, photographic reports, and vision statements by the architect, woven together with a critical essay by Christoph Grafe. It is published in conjunction with Building Correctly, a lecture by Francesca Torzo which offers a privileged insight in her conceptual world of references.

For the fifth book in the In Practice series, architect Aurélie Hachez and cultural anthropologist Leeke Reinders invite readers on a road journey through three transformative projects: L'Ermitage in urban Brussels, suburban Jubel, and rural Ulysse.
This volume not only explores the design process and its subsequent adoption by inhabitants but also delves into the theoretical implications of object agency in AHA's work, the strategic day-to-day work ethic, and the creative portrayal of buildings as entities with their own narratives. 

The In Practice series explores the multiple ways in which architects can engage their professional architecture practice in academic research and reciprocally. In Practice seeks to open a space for architecture practices in research through the development of methodologies, conferences, publications and studios.

Accattone 8 addresses matters of construction in relation to time, use, change and technical knowledge against the backdrop of the ‘negative commons’ inherited from the productivist society of the past century – ‘zombie’ habits, desires, products and processes that our contemporary condition can no longer sustain, yet cannot help but reproduce.

Transforming and Renovating Aging Social Housing

Like many other cities in Europe, Brussels, following the significant expansion of social housing in the second half of the twentieth century, now faces the challenge of managing the decline of this extensive heritage amid increasing budgetary constraints. In this context, CIVA collaborated with KU Leuven and BMA to organise a series of three talks in 2022, hosted at various locations. This book stands as the culmination of these initiatives.

Real Life Brussels: Transforming and Renovating Aging Social Housing attempts to transcend disciplinary boundaries, encompassing architectural, historical, social, and environmental dimensions. It is largely based on content, projects, and reflections of the last years. In phase with its contents, it avoids the temptation of the tabula rasa and the illusion of original novelty. By curating a diverse array of contributions, visual surveys, improvised talks, student works, and ongoing projects, Real Life Brussels is an invitation to discover a tapestry of concerns and opportunities. it states the intrinsic complexity of the subject, suggesting that no single solution or perspective can fully encapsulate its entirety. The book’s ambition is to encourage an open-ended and collaborative dialogue among architects, scholars, policymakers, and the community. The true value of this book may not lie in providing ready-made solutions, but rather in inspiring stakeholders and observers with open-ended explorations and reflections.

The social, economic, constructional, environmental and climatic issues that, at the start of the twenty-first century, have called into question the foundations of the architectural project make up the theoretical background to the book devoted to the villa that Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret built in Carthage for Lucien Baizeau, Blanche Thiéblin and theirfamily.

The book is organized around two complementary analytical perspectives. The first is devoted to the history of Villa Baizeau, providing a full understanding of its reasons and meanings, its genesis, its theoretical importance, the role of the client and the joy provided by the house to the family, with the aim also of gathering the knowledge necessary for its restoration as a fundamental architecture of the twentieth century. The second is open to some of the greatest protagonists of architecture today and is in line with the cultural strategy of Le Corbusier, who was always able to reconsider his works in the light of contemporary phenomena, even through graphic manipulations, inverted plans and reversed photographs, in order to discover their unexpected potential. Thanks to these two lines of thought, history and architectural design engage in a dialogue that pays homage to Le Corbusier’s theoretical vision.

In the heart of the Congo rainforest the remains of the Yangambi INERA Research Station, that was dedicated to tropical agriculture, reveal the burden of the colonial past and its inextricable links to contemporary climate change. Through the voices of Paul Panda Farnana and Abiron Beirnaert - two scientists who worked at Yangambi between 1910 and 1950 - the Tree of Authenticity recounts the ecological destruction that began at the time of the Belgian colonisation.

Structured in three parts, the film combines personal testimonies with scientific findings to trace the legacy of Belgian colonisation – not only its profound impact on human lives but also on the natural world. A riveting historical document, L’arbre de l’authenticité is also a compelling portrait of lives across cultures and backgrounds, and a chilling reminder of what lies ahead if we fail to change our relationship with the environment.

Upside-down trees with roots reaching toward the cosmos, glasses, pitchers, transparent vessels, and bodies blending human and animal, male and female features populate Jacopo Pagin’s works. These figures reveal themselves in their decadent and symmetrical being, caught within a web of references centered on the evocative power of the gaze.

The first monograph dedicated to Jacopo Pagin, designed and edited by Ismaël Bennani and Orfée Grandhomme and featuring a critical contribution by Alessandra Franetovich, brings together over 200 drawings and paintings to explore the visionary, obsessive, and hypnotic qualities of the artist’s work and its profound connections with exotic, mediumistic, and new-age practices

The story of this book was built over time, through the many exchanges that took place between a photographer, the editors, graphic designers and authors.

Maxime Delvaux is best known for his commissioned photographs of contemporary buildings by architects such as Christian Kerez, Herzog & de Meuron, Bruther, Muoto, Baukunst and 51N4E. As a photographer, he also accompanies architects in the research process to design buildings and urban spaces, exhibitions and pedagogical experiments, as demonstrated by his long-lasting collaborations with Central ofaau and MBL architects. In this book, Delvaux pursues a more solitary trajectory, visiting buildings and sites which cover a much wider historical span and resonate with his personal fascinations.

The publication is structured around five photographic series, each devoted to a particular building, site or architect: Château de Chambord in France, Dilmun Burial Mounds in Bahrain, Jože Plečnik’s buildings in and around Ljubljana, Río Tinto in Spain, and Victor Horta’s Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels. It is, especially, a book of (hi)stories in which the series by Maxime Delvaux are accompanied by texts. For these, various authors have been invited to react to the images with the idea of experimenting with the text: fiction, historical essay, round-table discussion, scientific text and photonovel. Graphic designers played with text and images to give them form. The reader is in turn invited to create possible alliances between images and texts. Like Maxime Delvaux’s photographic approach, these texts and their articulation with the photographs are specific to each subject, illustrating five ways of showing and telling about places near and far.

Éléonore drives west. Her car breaks down in the middle of Brittany, France. She rents a bungalow there in a camping with a view of the lake, in which, it is said, lives a legendary beast. From mobile home to mobile home, she observes the present, summons the past and lets herself be invaded by fiction.

Aide à la conception et matérialisation du projet Fayd Tayf de Younes Rahmoun
en collaboration avec KGN (Jean-Daniel Bourgeois).
Réalisation de 77 volumes en verre de couleur + 7 volumes en verre clair
d'après le schéma de Younes Rahmoun.
Soufflage à la volée (sans moule) en partenariat avec Arcam Glass.
Suivi de production et mise en caisse par J-D Bourgeois et I. Bennani.
Fabrication de caisses de transport, emballage et livraison à la Galerie Imane Farès, Paris.

Aide à la conception et matérialisation du projet de socle en bas relief de
100 x 45 x 50 cm d'après deux peintures de Poussin pour Ali Cherri,
en collaboration avec Ismaël Bennani et Orfée Grandhomme.
Interprétation des compositions de Ali Cherri de 2 faces (45 x 50 et 45 x 100 cm)
pour la création de fichiers 3D en bas relief par Orfée Grandhomme.
Prototypage et fabrication des matrices, moulage silicone
Tirage Jesmonite de 2x2 faces + face supérieure lisse.
Fabrication de la structure du socle et assemblage des faces.
Fabrication de caisses de transport, emballage.
Suivi de production et mise en caisse par J-D Bourgeois et I. Bennani.

The Halaqat publication has been published in November 2022 by the editing house Überknackig. Get to know more about the project and read the “Lessons for the Future” for improved cultural relationships between Europe and the Arab world.

Mobility, financing, crisis as a permanent state, fair cultural relations, and exchange of expertise — these five themes marked the culmination of the “Lessons for the Future” publication, developed collaboratively by Halaqat experts in Brussels in May 2022. Together, these lessons outline a path toward strengthening cultural relations between Europe and the Arab world.

Sammy Baloji’s photographic and sculptural assemblages braid together the pre- and post-colonial histories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by examining the industrial and cultural heritage of the Katanga region. Shinkolobwe’s abstraction (2022) is an installation comprising historical documents and archive-based evidences of the competing interests of the Soviet Union and the United States to gain access to the Belgian Congo uranium in the 1940s and 1950s in Shinkolobwe, the largest uranium resource in the world. It parallels this history of resource exploitation with the generation of student activists, whose revolutionary thinking to decolonise the country is charted in Pedro Monaville’s recent book Students of the World (2022).

Accattone 7 deals with open-air domesticity and the diplomatic hospitality of land. It presents intellectual and architectural projects, both contemporary and historical, for alternative modes of living.

Grand Dessein du Rationalisme is a hybrid publication that gathers 18 architecture projects from the student collectives of Roberto Gargiani’s Superstudio at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, 2020–2021, and a series of 13 theoretical, practical and historical reflections on (antagonistic) rationalism in architecture by Marco Assennato, Jean-Louis Cohen, Massimo De Angelis, Natalie Donat-Cattin, Roberto Gargiani, Silvia Groaz, Boris Hamzeian, Marson Korbi, André Kempe & Oliver Thill, Éric Lapierre, Francesco Marullo, Point Supreme, Ten Studio, Christophe Van Gerrewey and Adrien Verschuere.

In this book, Matthie Wellner and Buero Kofink Schels (architects Simon Jüttner and Sebastian Kofin) unfold the design process of T.I.A. House 1+2, a project they developed and built in the city of Almeria on the southern Spanish coast.
Using a series of unpublished documents, sketches, scale models and snapshots, they examined the critical value of real-time improvisation within the profession of architecture. Three additional contributions bring new insights on practice-based research and image theory. The publication is the result of a collaboration between KU Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (ULB) and the University of Liège within the research group "Architecture in Practice", which investigates the ways in which architectural practice and academic research can enrich each other.

Research sketches in discussion by Sammy Baloji, Ismaël Bennani & Orfée Grandhomme, 2021

De publicatie An artist who happens to be from Syria reflecteert over de hedendaagse kunstscène in Europa die voortdurend gevoed en beïnvloed wordt door nieuwkomers. De lezer wordt uitgenodigd om weerspiegelingen te ontdekken over de diverse artistieke uitingen van een dynamische kunstscène met wortels in Syrië.

In summer 2019, artist Eva Le Roi and architect Pierre Burquel travelled to São Paulo to research its particular urban conditions. Five subjective axonometric drawings on a 1:1000 scale ensued: Telhados, Piscinões, Condomínios, Campos and Galerias.
The book Five Stories of São Paulo, designed by Ismaël Bennani and Orfée Grandhomme, reproduces these drawings on their original scale.

Raamwerk In Practice is one of the ten prize winners of the DAM Book Award 2021 amongst 235 candidates.

The authors Bart Decroos and Raamwerk (architects Gijs De Cock and Freek Dendooven) unfold the design process of Lichtervelde Youth Centre, through a set of unpublished work documents including sketches, scale models, plans, and pictures. With contributions by Harold Fallon, Benoît Vandenbulcke and Benoît Burquel. The book is double-blind peer reviewed.
It is published by Mer (imprint of Borgerhoff & Lamberigts)

It is also available digitally in open access.

Une jeune adulte va filmer son cousin plus âgé, qui l’a fascinée toute son enfance. Les années ont creusé leurs différences et figé les souvenirs. En prenant la chasse comme point de départ, les deux cousin.e.s dialoguent sur cette passion qui les oppose, en vue de dépasser ce qui les sépare maintenant qu’ils sont devenus adultes. Une double traque commence : lui avec les animaux, elle avec lui et ses propres souvenirs; lui armé d’un fusil, elle d’une caméra.

Teaser: https://vimeo.com/481367744

Accattone #6 explores a renewed relationship with land, matter, ‘nature’ and localities against the backdrop of the new climate regime.

Based entirely on the work of Armin Linke, Accattone #5 explores photography in relation to the major architecture of public and private institutions: the infrastructure of the Roman Empire, neoclassical Athens, the United Nations headquarters, neo-liberal corporate environments and the fragile European institutions in Brussels.
Monuments are carefully crafted to convey determined sets of aesthetic codes and political values, incorporated in a purportedly eternal and total character. Photography can challenge the power of such representations by bringing out their inherent glitches, small cracks and everyday ambiguities. It can reprogramme architecture.

The island of Ouessant is off the very tip of Brittany, making it the last bit of land before America. All its men used to work at sea and the island was therefore almost exclusively populated by women. The film's director, as she immerses herself in the life of the island, plunges into the footage, and, somewhere between dream and reality, she identifies with Barba, a girl from Ouessant whose father disappeared at sea without a trace. How, then, can she grieve? The film adopts the form of an ethnographic tale, halfway between an anthropological documentary, a holiday video and a work of fiction.

Magazine produced within the exhibition Corporate Arcadia, curated by Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon and commissioned by the CIVA’s Contemporary Architecture Department, Brussels, 23 Jun — 24 Sep 2017. Then hosted at TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Department of Management in the Built Environment, 7 — 22 Dec 2017.

Corporate Arcadia looks at what is usually disregarded by architecture culture: the corporate architecture of banking headquarters, office buildings and hotels that has mostly shaped the city of Brussels in the 1990s and early 2000s. It does so with a twist:
1/ Armin Linke’s photographic work from inside the Corporate Arcadia reveals the hidden activities of fifteen institutions and at the same time ‘restores beauty to these invisible sites’, overlapping architecture, interior design and social functions.
2/ Magazine excerpts and videos offer thematic insights and counterpoints in the form of seven ‘double figures’, letting emerge multiple dimensions and critical knots.
3/ Models and documents retrieved on site or from the architects’ archives are called to perform as embodied figures on a stepped theatre of objects: if their position is static, the concepts they carry are mobile, open to interpretation and recombination.

Links:
Press kit
CIVA website
TU Delft videos

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, double-sided masks and architectural strata in a floor slab or a facade, totemic mock-ups on a 1:1 scale and metaphors in the desert.

Installation in process in the Horta Hall, proposed by artist and exhibition curator Sammy Baloji. The work is inspired by traditional motifs of the Justice Hall of Niangara, DRC, which had been commissioned to local painters by the Belgian colonial administration back in 1903.

The Ideal Husband
Written by Dorothée Dupuis; Thomas Min, Egon Van Herreweghe

16pg, 15.7x9.4cm, bw laser, stapled, 250 copies
Ghent: Editions Menard, 2016

"The Ideal Husband is a short story written by Dorothée Dupuis at the request of Thomas Min and Egon Van Herreweghe in response to the eponymous exhibition in Jan Colle Gallery in December 2016." — The Authors

Contributed by EVH.

Part of the exhibition 802. That is where, as you heard, the elephant danced the malinga. The place where they now grow flowers, Sammy Baloji, 2016

Accattone #2 draws on several themes from the first issue — material shifts, models and model-like buildings, the role of images in the design process — to address specific methods and approaches which challenge established codes: bricolage, minor architecture, personal narratives and collections.

Accattone #3 is both an autonomous object and a continuation of Accattone #2. It consists in a 96 x 64 cm poster folded into an 8-page publication where architects Martinez Barat Lafore present a collection of 137 images and quotations inherent to their conceptual and built work.

In the realm of Sammy Baloji’s Hunting & Collecting project, we designed this edition as a lacunary newspaper gathering Sammy’s photographs of Goma war refugees camp and of miners sorting and packing minerals, the list of the NGOs registered in North Kivu and South Kivu, and an illustration based on the Hall of gorillas diorama from the MRAC Tervuren. It was printed in one colour on a broadsheet format on a coldset rotary press in Nivelles, Belgium.

Hunting and Collecting, 2015
Installation comprenant The Album, une série de collages photographiques (40 x 55 cm chacun) et une sculpture en métal (400 x 550 cm), et Hunting & Collecting, un livre d’artiste (32 pages, 37,5 x 31 cm), une impression photo listant les ONG du Nord et Sud Kivu (dimensions variables) et des photographies d’archives courtesy American Museum of Natural History, New York et Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren
Œuvre unique

un livre de trente-deux pages, le dessin du parcours en Afrique du commandant Pauwels réalisée par Chrispin Mvano, la carte utilisée par Carl Akeley lors de l’une de ses expéditions en Afrique, ainsi que les dessins des études minéralogiques effectuées par la compagnie minière congolaise Gécamines.

Sur le site d'Eléonore:
Society’s impact on the animal kingdom and the animals’ unique ways of adapting are revealed in three dramatized tales of the feral—wild animals descended from domesticated ones—each as original and playful as it is perverse.
sur le site de Grégoire:
On the border between France and Belgium, the population of foxes increased in a extraordinary way. In Brussels, the Rose-ringed parakeet colonized the parks of the city. In Colombia, hippopotamuses imported from Africa live now in wild nature, terrorizing the population. These animals were moved from their natural environment by the men and breed quickly, producing ambivalent reactions in their new environment.

David Horvitz, “Stolen Spoons”, 136 pages (68 postcards), English, full color, text by Helga Christoffersen, Design Überknackig. Printer: Drifosett, Belgium, edition of 400, ISBN: 978-87-91409-77-6, published by Pork Salad Press, June 2015.

Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 1, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8791409772
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8791409776

Accattone 1 features artists and architects dealing with found forms, state transformations and 1:1 scale models.

KOPIOITU proposes the notion of cut/copy as a secession from site-specificity. A literary approach to the dichotomy of an original and its copy is needed here. Site-specificity is questioned, as well as the increasing demand of tailored art practices providing institutions and administrations. No precise orders will be given regarding the site-specificity question, so the epicentrum of this experiment is a consideration of a larger totality, profoundly linked to the contemporary art practices and structures in the present emerging European scene. KOPIOITU creates a double exhibition, a mirroring situation or a splitting divergent show between the galleries Sic (Helsinki) and Komplot (Brussels). This is double negative production: twice the same, but not exactly.

https://morganefourey.com/Ni-bois-pour-construction-ni-steres-d-allumettes

This publication shows how an alternative management company functions, and howit offers possibilities to a dozen talented artists to profile themselves in an original way. An extensive archive provides a chronological overview of all 78 completed projects and collaborations set up by Margarita Production between 2003 and 2013.

“Micro, contact, strings & things is a publication that reads like an inspirational sketchbook which shows us a unique image of an altered art practice by a young generation performing artists.” Julie Rodeyns, H art

“With its design of Überknackig that is chic and cheap - that glitter cover! - this publication feels like a poetry book, that friendship booklet that we gave to each other in school and that's appropriate: Above all Margarita remains a class populatedby fellow artists.” Ive Stevenheydens, Agenda, BDW

WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art has published a publication about the socio-artistic practices it undertook between 2009 and 2013: from a lighting installation in a public space, to transforming a vacant lot into a shared garden, to creating a large fresco depicting the children of Vorst.

Below is the foreword to "Getuigenissen/Témoignages" (Testimonials/Testimonials) by Dirk Snauwaert, director of WIELS, and Frédérique Versaen, education and community development officer, in which they contextualize their socio-artistic work.