03 Huiswerk Architecten - Homework

The Flanders Architecture Institute provides a forum for Young architects, urban planners and researchers in Flanders. This generation currently occupies a relevant experimental position in architecture and related disciplines. In their work, architecture assumes a wide variety of forms and expressions. Again and again it is given a new interpretation, sometimes less visible and even unprecedented. Each issue of the Young Architects in Flanders series presents a cross section of a particular architectural practice: designs for buildings, theoretical discourse, urban planning studies, artistic installations... The work selected is surprising, original and of considerable importance regarding the position of and critical reflection on contemporary architecture in Flanders.

In its search for latent meanings in architecture, Huiswerk has developed a design practice characterised by intensive interaction between building and contemplation. The architects themselves put it like this: architecture is no longer the expression of a construction but increasingly the construction of an expression. We do not build with bricks but with reflections on bricks. This instruments Wieërs and Somers employ are analysed on the basis of four basic concepts. They themselves write about the relationship between concept and context, literalness, Unzeitgemass or untimeliness and about the over- or underdesigning of architecture. In four short responses the architectural critic Arthur Wortmann provides a commentary on these key concepts and in an accompanying essay investigates the interaction between thought and action.