Marcel Smets
Marcel Smets’ (b. 1947) professional path as an urbanist, urban historian and theorist unfolds in parallel to the becoming of the post-industrial city, hence this influential designerly and intellectual production constitutes a prime medium for the appreciation not only of a status artis, but also of an evolution-of-the-art [of urban design]. The relevance and impact of Smets’ career have so far been acknowledged by several noteworthy institutions and distinctions, among which: member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (since 2009), Flemish Government Architect (2005-2010), jury member of the EU Mies Award 2022, member of the Scientific Committee of Europan architectural competitions (1988–2004), president of the Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement (IVM, 2012–16), MoRO - Prize attributed by the Ghent University (2014), Matexi Legacy Award (2016), emeritus professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, visiting lecturer and critic at Harvard GSD (2002-2004).
Through a selection of nine projects and studies for the cities Leuven, Antwerp, Rouen, Genova, Oporto, Gent, Hasselt or Nantes, directed or co-directed by Marcel Smets over more than 30 years, the book highlights and historicises the present-day momentum of a new conjunction between the urban and the industrial. If urbanism’s disciplinary emergence in the late nineteenth century was catalysed by the proliferation of urbanisation as a consequence of industrial development, the derelict ex-industrial or infrastructural sites constitute prime experimental laboratories for contemporary urban design. The regeneration of these obsolete spaces – our own ”Antiquity” - has become both an end and an instrument for today’s urban development.
Critical catalogue of the itinerant exhibit organised by the research group Inventarium of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, in partnership with the contemporary art organisation Centrul de Interes, this book brings together contributions by a select group of scholars, stemming from diverse disciplinary, international, academic and professional contexts: Paola Viganò (IUAV Venice), Éric Alonzo (U Gustave Eiffel Paris), Aglaée Degros (TU Graz), Ovidiu Leuce (Centrul de Interes Cluj), Maarten Van Acker (U Antwerp), Silvia Benedito (Harvard GSD), Guillaume Vanneste (UC Louvain), Daniela Pennini (EPAMSA Paris), Andreea Milea (TU Cluj-Napoca), edited by Cristina Purcar (TU Cluj-Napoca). Their incursions into Marcel Smets’ projects and writing, as well as his own retrospection in the frame of an extensive interview, offer complementary vantage points of derelict ex-industrial areas, reinvented as paramount sites of socially engaged contemporary creativity.
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