安特卫普省政府大楼 / XDGA
发布日期:2024.09.02
The basis for architecture in our way of working is to carry out a meticulous scanning of a brief, a program or a context. Context not just as that what physically surrounds a project, but the larger field of social, economic, political, administrative and also technical issues, all on an equal level. This activity of accurate and systematic reading leads to a matrix of knowledge that frames any architectural decision. Sometimes this framework functions as a backdrop for postponed intuitions, sometimes it forms the battlefield for a bombardment of architectural proposals that slowly gain self-evidence through a process of trial and error.
The scanning raises new questions, opens up unexplored fields, reveals hidden opportunities, or brings together so-called incompatibilities. Through this working method all projects are rooted in their context, but as context has a visible and a hidden part, they often surpass their physical context and they sometimes completely transform it.
This explorative approach leads to a working method, not a style. Instead, style is restrictive to exploration. Our approach saves us from dogmatic thinking, from an all too narrow agenda, from the architectural one-liner.