Layered Tables and Compact TV Monitors: Exhibiting Architecture and Flanders’s Urban Conditions at the Turn of the Millennium

Abstract

The travelling exhibition Homeward, Contemporary Architecture in Flanders (1999–2001) was commissioned by the Flemish Ministry of Culture and curated by Maarten Delbeke, Steven Jacobs, and Katrien Vandermarliere. The curators selected nine buildings and an urban design project, not merely as “best of” contemporary practices, but rather to articulate a new discourse for evaluating contemporary architecture based on the Flanders Environmental Structure Plan. The exhibition and accompanying publication aimed to foster new perspectives on the interaction between architecture, urban design, and the social, cultural, and environmental factors of the region’s urban sprawl. Using diverse media and a modular furniture system, the exhibition created a framework to explore how the selected designs and Flanders’s spatial environment affected each other. The layered narrative offered a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the Flemish landscape. This paper explores the symbolic and operational functions of Homeward’s exhibition apparatus, showing how discourse and media combined into a transfiguration of the spatial environment, promoting a new architectural agenda for Flanders.

Image : Book cover of Borret et al., 1998. English version of the publication designed by Gert Audenaert and published by deSingel International Arts Centre.