NEW. SCHOOL. ARCHITECTURE

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Published: Jun 1, 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/clara.002.0209

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Wim Cuyvers
Refuge Montavoix

Abstract

Transcript of the Inaugural Lecture of the 2013-2014 academic year, Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta - ULB.


The scene takes place at nightfall in the K-building of the Université libre de Bruxelles on the Solbosch campus. Everything is clean, beautiful and tidy. Two thirds of the eight hundred and nine varnished wooden chairs are empty. The audience, half of whom are former students and professors, are gathered in small groups of two to five people. On the stage, behind a wooden lectern (also varnished), Wim Cuyvers looks alternately at the audience and at the few pages he is holding in his hands. On the screen to his right are projected three words: NEWS. SCHOOL. ARCHITECTURE.
He asks to dim the lights. It is getting darker.

Article Details

Issue
No. 2 (2014): Brussels mosque as a project
Section
Miscellaneous papers
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Author Biography

Wim Cuyvers, Refuge Montavoix

Wim Cuyvers (1958, Hasselt) works on the acceptance of an unacceptable human condition. He does not really believe in a language of architecture or in an institution that can teach it. He focuses on the human rather than the social and sees space as something that takes place between people. He expresses himself through different media: Built spaces, installations, videos, texts, urban research, speeches, performances... At the end of the 2000s, affirming that the position of the artist is hardly tenable in contemporary society - as evidenced by the virulent reactions that many of his projects and artistic interventions have aroused - he leaves the comfortable position of the architect who decides, the comfortable position of the professor who teaches, the comfortable position of the intellectual who thinks, to work in an isolated refuge in the middle of the mountains, in Saint-Claude in the Jura: the Montavoix. Convinced that this is the ultimate public space and that the last true place for contemporary art lies only in this public space, he welcomes juvenile delinquents, students, and anyone else who wants to help the refuge exist, by agreeing to commit themselves, and to expose themselves.