"OFFICE: Kersten Geers & David Van Severen + Bas Princen, a radical act of framing"

di Francesco Santoro pubblicato su "Compasses", n.13, 2011

The Belgian architectural OFFICE of Kersten Geers & David Van Severen represents one of the
most interesting practices in the recent european panorama.

Selected by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, exhibition director of the 12th Bienal of Architecture
in Venice, as one of the participant of the international venue entitled “People meet in
architecture”, OFFICE resulted winner, together with the Dutch photographer Bas Princen, of the
Silver Lion as the most promising young practice.

In the International Jury’s motivations the prize has been awarded for their ability to reconcile
photographic analysis and design intervention into a coherent vision, particularly given the
project’s resonance with the theme proposed by the exhibition director.

In this year intervention, The Belgian office presented a “Garden Pavilion” with 7 rooms located
inside an old storage building at the far end of the Arsenale exhibition promenade, furnished with
21 perspectives, Bas Princen’s photographic investigations and the practice’s photographic collages.

The revision of the exhibition space assigned has been completed through the proposition of a
garden furnished with chairs and covered with gravel, used as the organizer element of the existing
vegetation, below a wide white canvas stretched over few thin steel pillars, definying an abstract
and immaterial space that frames in a light and moderate way the materic concreteness of the old
pavilion.

The anonymous spaces of the existing architecture depicted in Bas Princen’s photographs are
shown together with the fictitious views of Kersten Geers & David Van Severen’s projects, in a
visual and conceptual refined correspondence.

The contraposition sought between the dichotomies of order and chaos, interior and exterior,
nature and culture, present in both photomontages and exhibition installation, reveals itself
functional to the holistic approach of the Belgian practice, in a pragmatic design method based on
simple and intelligent solutions, able to reach a high level of poetry.

As Christophe Van Gerrewey explains, the architecture of Kersten Geers and David Van Severen
oscillates between the opposite concepts of abstraction and empathy, as expressed by theorist
Wilhelm Worringer in 1908 essay “Abstraktion und Einfühlung”, in the attempt to reintroduce
order, structure and spatial recognition in designing spaces and, at the same time, includes the
immaterial essence of architecture as lived space, “architecture and everything else”. 1

The exchange between architecture and life is realized through the interplay between abstract form
and empathy, as shown in Bas Princen and OFFICE’s 21 photographic perspectives and, similarly,
in the 22nd perspective at 1:1 scale which is the “Garden Pavilion” itself, where you can look at the
perspectives or become part of one of them.

As in the Belgian installation of the previous Bienal of Architecture in 2008, where, through a
“radical act of framing”, using Ellis Woodman’s definition, the secessionist pavilion itself was
packed inside an exterior structure of galvanized steel panels, emphasizing by this means the
interior space lived by the visitors and poetically revealed through a floor covered with confettis –
therefore named “after the party” – then in the present intervention, the Belgian office
distinguished itself for a analogous critical sensibility to the context, coherent with their peculiar
architectural poetics.2

1
Christophe Van Gerrewey –“Architecture and everything else”, catalogue “GARDEN PAVILION - 7 rooms 21 perspectives”
2
Ellis Woodman – “Picturing Buildings”, catalogue “GARDEN PAVILION - 7 rooms 21 perspectives”
As Kersten Geers explains, reproposing the concept of functional flexibility, not impositive, free
expression of the users creative needs, typical of the recent northern design tradition, “If you
consciously make a very precise architecture you do somehow always an act of framing, of
densifying or marking an area different from the other, and then the way people actually uses it, is
exactly working out, because you do not have to functionally define it so well, in a certain sense this
disconnection between spatial decisions and functionalism is very important”, and concluding: ”I
think this pavilion is in many ways the same pavilion as the pavilion two years ago and is in both
cases an attempt trying to understand how you define space with the minimum of intervention”.

The 2008 installation was in fact based on a genial intuition of architects Kersten Geers and David
Van Severen that, through a new steel façade, managed to display the old pavilion as a reality to
experience physically in its architectural purity, inside a patio with a floor entirely covered with
colored confettis, revealing through the people negative traces the uses of the enclosed spaces.

In a similar way the spatial definition of the 2010 “Garden Pavilion”, developed with poor
materials such as gravel and a simple diaphanous canvas roof, determines the intervention’s high
level of abstraction, through the pragmatic attitude of the office’s design methods.

Likewise in the cases shown, the galvanized steel panels and confettis, as well as the fabric roof and
gravel, represent the simple means through which the “pragmaticism becomes the poetry of the
project”.

The architecture of Kersten Geers and David Van Severen is based on the search of spatial
definitions, directly related to the context, considered in all its ambiguity and polyvalence, as an
element to face, to interpretate or even to abstract from, in the definition of the exactness of built
space.

Similarly accurate results the graphic representation of the studio’s designs, through the use of
abstract perspectives and photomontages, where the distinction between designed and built reality
becomes very subtle, according to the intellectual construction and methodolical approach of the
Belgian office.

Exemplificative of the OFFICE design philosophy is the Border Crossing between USA and Mexico
project, recently winner of an international competition.

The walled enclosure of the modern border oasis, constitutes an additional “radical act of framing”,
opposing the ordered nature of a secluded garden planted with a rational grid of palm trees, to the
desolated landscape of the grungy Tex-Mex desert outside.

As Kersten Geers notices: “more than reading a context, we have an ambivalent relation with the
context, on one hand we believe the project is only finish when you see the relation with the
context, I think at the same time there is a certain autonomy of the project. The Mexican-United
States border crossing project represents a good example, the element on itself it seems to almost
being thrown there as a congexture, at the same time of course the rectangle with the palm trees
only acquires meaning because there is the desert around it, so you deal with the landscape in a
way, but you do that often while almost or seemingly ignoring it.”

And how David Van Severen explains: ”this ambiguity is somehow very important to us, we can
relate and being very contextual but at the same time very abstract in the shape like the Tex-Mex
project which is very abstract but very real at the same time, in its reference to the M’zab oasis in
Algeria with its ancient engineering irrigation systems”.