OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   A vacation house rises on a slope as a simple prism propped up by ‘pilotis’ in order to alter the terrain as little as possible and give the occupants good views of a nearby lake. Inserted into the block, executed with untreated cross-laminated timbe

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The brick partitions of an industrial construction in the vicinity provided the inspiration for the revamp of this house as a succession of rooms separated by thick walling. From the street side to the rear of the plot, the walls gradually become tal

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Transformed into an academic center, an old slaughterhouse has doubled its capacity through the insertion of a mezzanine floor that at the same time serves to stabilize the facades. With a smooth finish to differentiate it from the original frame, an

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The centripetal layout of a house enhances the connection between indoor spaces and the exterior and facilitates circulation for one of the resident family’s members, a wheelchair user. Varying in proportions and ceiling height, all the rooms of the

Christ & Gantenbein OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The rectangular volumes that remain by Floralia Hall are drastically altered, making the original neoclassical appearance disappear. This huge central nave functions as an interior extension of the public space surrounding it, now transformed into a

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The new brewery for Brussels Beer Project (BBP) is located along the Brussels canal within the rapidly redeveloping industrial zone of Port Sud. The building houses the complete beer production process, but is also open to the public. It is conceived

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The new Tim Van Laere Gallery of contemporary art in Antwerp goes up in a central location within the New South district (Nieuw Zuid), an ambitious urban redevelopment plan launched by the city council in collaboration with the private developer Trip

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Sited right at the entrance to the new Mediapark in Brussels, the Maison Media Huis contains various entities related to media and broadcasting. Instead of one large building, three buildings are stacked in a pyramid formation that is immediately rec

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   United States   Being as it is in a seismic zone, the Yale Union contemporary art center needs to update its current infrastructure, a complex of historic brick buildings from the early 1900s. Rather than undertaking a structural renovation and jeopardizing the spat

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Tondo is a footbridge in the center of Brussels that connects the offices of the Chamber of Representatives with its recent extension, the Forum building, on the other side of the street. The bridge was explicitly designed as a spatial element rather

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   France   The competition-winning project set out to renovate and transform the Caserne de Reuilly, a former infantry quarter located in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. Dating from the 19th century, during World War II the Caserne de Reuilly served as a mobi

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   A crematorium is an important public building. It has, however, a conflicted attitude towards self-expression, torn between its technical content and its ceremonial character. To overcome this, the building is designed as a big inclined table, of whi

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This project converts a decaying building into a contemporary and durable office space without demolishing its skeleton. The existing building was stripped and then wrapped with an independent facade that serves as both an architectural element and a

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This building was commissioned by the Provincial Development Company of West Flanders to provide four large rentable working and production spaces for young companies in various professional fields. Raised on an elongated site in the municipality of

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   United Arab Emirates   This set of gardens was designed and built for the 11th Sharjah Biennial, directed by the Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa. After developing a strategy to urbanize the existing heritage area of Sharjah, the design proposed a set of pavilions that compl

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Set on a large, secluded site on the periphery of Brussels, Villa Der Bau replaces a mansion from the 1900s, taking roughly its volume. The base of the building, half-submerged in the rising terrain, is formed by a compact grid of rooms organized as

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The center of Brussels has a periphery inside. A piece of landscape, green, open, idyllic, as if it were on the fringes of the city. In order to double the surface of a seemingly freestanding house in this strangely lush environment, it was decided t

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This weekend house fills the whole of a deep lot in a small town in Flanders. An existing row house on the site is turned into guest quarters, while its long backyard is absorbed, transformed into the weekend house proper. The new house is organized

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The small town of Tielt, in the province of West Flanders, is the home of this electronic components shop built on an an elongated, irregular site. The first design decision was to raise the brick party walls to their maximum height. On the side towa

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This freestanding dwelling is placed in the middle of a parcel between woods and farmland near the village of Buggenhout. The modular steel fence that encloses it is an integral part of the design, defining the volume of the house and setting it apar

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The expansion of a nineteenth-century townhouse in the heart of Ghent resulted in a second house – a ‘summer house’ marked out by a precise modular frame of steel sections, overgrown with grapevines, that sits in the irregular outdoor space alongside

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The project for an extension of the Design Museum Ghent is composed by a stacking of various geometrical figures. Together with a concrete slab defined by the perimeter of the site, the stacking offered a variety of spaces on each floor. While the ma

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Estonia   This proposal is for a center dedicated to the contemporary classical composer Arvo Pärt. It is located near Kellasalu in Pärt’s native Estonia, in an elegant, dense stretch of forest where the silence of nature presents itself to those who are willi

Kersten Geers and David Van Severen draw buildings of bold shapes and exact spatial sequences, in a bid for conceptual clarity that the Belgian architects also show in their writings and lectures. In this ambiguous position between practice and theor

Enrique Morillo   A rare bird in the contemporary architectural scene is OFFICE. Few architects have managed to combine practice and theory with acumen, but for Kersten Geers and David Van Severen – as for their admired Rossi and Venturi – they are inseparable, and th

With the clear line of their cartoonist compatriots, Kersten Geers and David Van Severen draw their buildings with bold shapes and precise spatial sequences, in an eagerness for the conceptual clarity that they also demonstrate in their writings and

David Van Severen   Kersten Geers    These projects were designed between 2004 and 2019. Until now, fifteen have been built. Some of them are better known elsewhere than they are in their own neighbourhood. They have double lives – both as the main protagonist of an architectural narrat

Jean-Louis Cohen   Questioned on the appropriation of existing forms in OFFICE’s projects, Kersten Geers has affirmed in 2017: “We are interested in references, but we use them ‘lightly’.” This modest statement provides an initial orientation for the analysis of the wo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Kersten Geers and David Van Severen write like they design, with a clear line. Their interpretative transparency – both are committed to teaching –, their visual acuity and their intellectual impact make it almost redundant to comment on the work of