Prozesse reflexiven Entwerfens – Entwerfen und Forschen in Architektur und Landschaft

4 | Muster | Pattern 5 | Space frame
mations. The Fyber Space Project wanted to create a tension between the two different
realms, looking for cross-fertilisation. Was it not the novel lens of the diagram,
that enabled Colin Rowe to compare Palladio and Le Corbusier, putting both of them
in an entire new and clarifying light? 14 Encouraged by Kipnis’ text ‘The Cunning of
Cosmetics’, a reading of the work of H&dM which receives its sharpness through the
questions he raises as an apostle of ‘the digital side’, I tried to elope from the digital
camp to the tectonic. 15 Working for Zaha Hadid in London and later Christian Kieckens
in Brussels informed and fed my research.
But it was not until my own practice ‘Voet en De Brabandere’ was founded in 2012 that I
felt free to fully explore these two worlds in a productive dialog, taking on board elements
that reinforced one hybrid design process. As such, the scenography for the exhibition
of the Henry Van de Velde Label (2014) grew from a spaceframe and a knot (fig. 4-9).
The overall pattern was an offset of the Lokettenzaal of the Flemish Parliament, a structure
designed by the modernist architect Victor Bourgeois. We deformed it into a smaller
maze, bringing in the human scale and frames for objects. The central point of control
was utterly structural and repetitive: the inverted column, as an homage to Mies van der
Rohe, and its connection to the beam structure. Depending on the size of the objects and
the exhibition scenario, structural elements were eliminated, resulting in an environment
that intensified the relation between the viewer and the object.
86
THE OTHER LENS TOWARDS HABITABILITY Within the work
of Voet en De Brabandere, the ontological was equally the means to infuse the human
aspect within the generic approach of pattern structures. Beyond the literary and formal
approach of digital or parametric design, the complexity of field conditions induced a
layered architectural discourse as language and as technique that did not aim for a total
rupture with history and the reinvention of the new. It sought fundaments and ontologies,
not as dogmas, but as engaging with an ongoing process where discontinuities,