Driekoningenstraat 39-41

Architects de vylder vinck taillieu serve up pictorial acrobatics in Driekoningenstraat in Antwerp. Thingification and figurative composition are a step up towards the next level: the constructional picture is cut up and stuck back together again as in a collage. In the infill project in Driekoningenstraat this applies just as much to the typology as to the materials and details.

The composition of the street façade with its classic windows and cornices, its bricked-up openings and large red bricks has a seemingly trivial detail in the masonry. A lintel is ‘drawn’ in the brickwork above each window. It is only the staggering of the joints in the masonry that makes the notion of a lintel visible. This drawn lintel hides a simple steel girder that takes over the real work: bearing the weight of façade masonry above the window opening. The lintel has here been left behind and thereby reminds us of the time when façades were not yet divided off by layers of insulation.

The façade actually obediently falls into line with the great tectonic tradition in architecture, trying to build bridges between the street as an external condition and the supporting structure as an internal form. The tectonic way of thinking has always had a figurative relationship with real building.

This text is based on an article by Dirk Somers, published in Architecture Review Flanders N°10. Radical Commonplaces. European Architectures from Flanders.