Exhibition / Eagles of Architecture

A drawing describes reality, so architects draw to understand the world. This exhibition presents the work of the young Antwerp office Eagles of Architecture. In a self-designed scenography, the architects present three projects and a series of drawings. One very special figure looms large in the work of Bart Hollanders, the founder of Eagles of Architecture. Ever since his first encounter with the American neo-avant-garde, he has been chasing the spirit of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In 2016, the Flanders Architecture Institute showed a Wunderkammer at the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt, with work by a new generation of architects from Flanders and the Netherlands. What connected these Young Turks, according to the architecture critic Tom Avermaete, was ‘the constant search for cultural anchor points’. Eagles of Architecture look for this frame of reference within the discipline of architecture itself. The drawing of illustrious examples, such as the Palazzo Rucellai by the fifteenth-century humanist Leon Battista Alberti, illustrates the patience from which their projects originate.

Through drawing, the historical context of Alberti’s work or the spirit of Mies van der Rohe can be gradually expanded. All that remains is the question posed by the American architect John Hejduk: ‘Is architecture the result of a geometric exercise or a clever game in which we hold images up to the world?’

Programme:

8pm | panel discussion

• Bart Hollanders (Eagles of Architecture)
• Benjamin Eggermont (De Smet Vermeulen architects)
• Aslı Çiçek (KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture)
• Sofie De Caigny (Flanders Architecture Institute)
  
• Introduced and moderated by Vlad Ionescu
  (UHasselt, Faculty of Architecture and Art)