Retrospective Robbrecht en Daem

摘要

Architects don't get to choose who their clients will be, how solvent they are, or which needs have to be addressed. So, the architect'soeuvre is the result of cumulative affinities, confidences won, presentations aced, cultural festivals and economic booms, but also off-days, rejections, slights, local conflicts, economic downturns, petty enmities. You don't choose the body of work; it chooses you. At best, it builds you: slowly forcing you to expand your capacities, to learn another institutional or regulatory dialect. Mostly, an understandable caution on the part of clients, and the energy-sapping demands of invention, leave architects repeating themselves with minor variation. What, then, to make of a body of work so coherent, but so diverse, as that of Robbrecht en Daem?