Marc Belderbos is a French speaker.
This paper is a translation of the original biography in French.
The language of Marc Belderbos in French is precise.
The translation is therefore difficult....
So those who can read French better take note of this biography in French here.
Marc Belderbos
saw in 1972
architecture, by its silent authority
as the way to occupy his life,.
He introduced himself to the discipline
at Louvain la Neuve (UCLouvain) in Belgium.
One single teacher, Yves Lepère,
taught there in the certainty that
architecture is the equi-voque knowledge
of the first stance in the Real of matter
and
of the first stance in the Real of the human-subject.
Lepère also possesses a certain didactic genius
which was to locate and indicate
the indices of the acts of this knowledge
in the work of the students.
Lepère is, for all that is theory, silent.
He evokes thoughts and, in so doing, summons thought.
(See a short hommage entitled 'La Non-Pensée d'Yves Lepère').
Lepère worked for a long time with Louis Kahn,
whose attitude he considered to be just :
Kahn held architecture to be the memory of all time
and thus preceded time
in the inaugural silence
of the law disposing the passage
from the Real to the Reality,
that is to say :
the silent passage from the impossible to the possible,
thus inaugurating the first operation of 'distinction',
establishing the law of distinction of language before language
or, in other words
the setting of matter into a signifying form
and
the silent passage from one signifier to another
or, in other words
the silent passage
from one matter to another matter,
or , in other words
the silent passage
from one possible to another possible.
(The Greek word for matter ‘phusis’ means ‘which makes possible’)
Lepère thus inaugurated,
through this intrigue of the silent law,
Marc Belderbos's thinking on architecture.
At this inauguration of the thought,
there is nothing yet formed,
but only the silent conviction that,
of architecture,
it is the drawing of its matter and its law that counts
as the inaugural event.
And that words count too!
They do not tell, they count.
They cut.
And their trenches
draw and give rhythm to
the opening of the signified.
The little text 'Enunciation of anguish and innocence',
- a dissertation at the end of his first studies -,
is a sign of this position.
(Read soon here)
Words, like architecture, are 'number',
as what is given by an order and a part of that order
to its inauguration.
Words thus have, necessarily,
an inaugural part of
a possible in the impossible.
Words form, in part,
inaugural events.
Unbeknownst to him,
Marc Belderbos questions
the inauguration of life.
The inauguration of anthropic life...
not animal life...
And in a muted way,
he brings together
drawing, words and architecture.
And he joins them to the words:
poetry or inaugural event, and mathematical precision.
It is already clear that
the reason for architecture
is to be found
in the poem and the mathem.
*
Still thinking nothing, Marc Belderbos went to Paris in 1978 and 79
where he learns nothing close to Bernard Kohn,
but where he saw the big city and its phenomena.
In 1980, he went to Rome.
There he studied architectural restoration at the University.
Not to become a restorer ,
but for the richness of the construction methods
and for the knowledge of the masters of ancient times.
At the same time,
a professor friend, Ignace Vandevivere,
entrusted him with
the Bauthier collection of drawings of Rome by northern masters.
Marc Belderbos visited, studied and finally got to know Rome,
this didactic city of all European architecture :
-Greek,
-Roman,
-the various failed revivals of the Middle Ages,
-all that medieval time of the loss of the human of Roman natural empirical matter
-followed by the construction of the human
central to itself and distant from the Real
of the humanist Renaissance,
-Mannerism, notably by Perruzi, which he measured with his friend Mark Wilson Jones,
-the Baroque of the multiplication of centers and the fiction of the infinite,
-the blackness of Piranesi, the misleading grace of the Enlightenment,
-Romanticism and the rationalist reaction,
-the modern movement,
-the post-modern moment.
He spent months at the Max Planck Institute in the Bibliotheca Hertziana
with Frommel, Winner, Nicole Crifo-Dacos
and he finally discovers the author of a large part of the drawings,
Eugène Ciceri, set designer at the Garnier Opera.
A minor discovery,
but a splendid time for him,
to order the evolution of the knowledge of space in the past.
Marc Belderbos worked, for half a year afterwards, with Paolo Portoghesi,
whose written work, breadth of culture and mental and verbal solidity fascinated him
but whose architecture repelled him.
But in Rome he also met the Gruppo Romano d'Architetti e d'Urbanisti, GRAU.
Mainly Alessandro Anselmi and Franco Pierluisi
but also Pierluigi Eroli, Gabriella Colluci, Enzo Rosato and Francesco Cellini.
It was…..
the Venice Biennale,
the Strada Novissima by Portoghesi
with the memorable GRAU façade designed by Anselmi,
-the tomb of modernism and post-modernism-,
which one crossed to find the joy of the event in history
It was….
'Controspazio',
the flower market of San Remo,
the cemetery of Parabita,
the projects of Santa Severina in Calabria.
But it is Anselmi's project for ‘Les Halles de Paris’
which shows above all
that it is the architecture and its layout
which are the foundations
of knowledge of stance
in front of the Real and in the World
of the sub-ject anthrope,
that is: the foundation of his dignity.
It is there,
in this place of work of the thought of an architecture,
first work of suturing to the tissue of a certain history of architecture
and then work of hosting the project's event-driven jet,
that Marc Belderbos was born in 1981.
Anselmi fascinated him; he offered him a thread of the history.
Anselmi taught him everything:
the matter,
the matter of drawing,
the matter of words,
the matter of the subject,
the matter of a society,
the matter of a world,
the matter of architecture,
architecture as a dis-position of matter.
Anselmi lived in the idea of a communism of matter
or a communism of possibility
cutting through the impossible
where the slender stance,
-that which makes subject-,
has the strength to locate new truths
from a godless immanence.
Anselmi, - man of dignity-,
has a stance proper to those
whose articulation of the verb is established before they speak.
He has worked to know everything there is,
and has cultivated the construction of this knowledge
in order to see and make seen a 'knowing to see’
specific to those - rare ones! -
who hold architecture to be
a sector of knowledge
of the subject's stance
and of society's primary stance.
And this despite the Real, despite the impossible.
He is one of those, -very rare-,
who hold that
this primary stance has an endless history
whose outcome is not in
the terror of the current market inconsistency.
For Anselmi, history is never at an end.
History is always unfinished.
And, moreover, if there is indeed a thread of the history
and if we are indeed the sum of history
it is equally clear
that history does not make the history that comes.
For Anselmi,
the history that comes is made of events,
sometimes, but rarely, apparently necessary.
Events which must be allowed to happen
through attention, in a good open position, to the unpresented.
Anselmi captures and tightens
the wonder and horror of this time of opening to the unpresented,
in his work on 'non renaissance centrality'
where the center is no longer to be found in the physical body of the thing,
though it is architected
or, -in a more strong way-,
where the center is no longer to be found!
Marc Belderbos senses a real pertinency in Anselmi,
well beyond the miserable adequacy
to the present time
of the representatives of Reality
or to the past time
of the representatives of death.
What Anselmi is saying is
that the anthrop,
in order to live,
it is not in the composition with Reality
that he will succeed in establishing his dignity
but by facing the Real,
not in the illusion of a Reality that has already been decided,
but in the stance of a desire in what is not yet shown, nor said:
the content of the Real.
The 'non-renaissance centrality',
is the signifier of this architecture of heterotopia.
(We often use the word 'anthrop',
on the intelligent suggestion of Jean Stillemans,
to avoid confusion, even partial,
with the dangerous vagueness of 'humanism' contained in 'human', 'human being'...
When we nevertheless use the word 'human'
it is in the sense of anthrop contained in anthropology.
Another important distinction: Real - Reality.
The Real is what there is a priori,
presented or not, but acting.
Yet without word without conception.
Before everything.
Reality is that which is understood, named, symbolized).
The anthrop, in this thought, has a major dignity:
to be able to stand just out the Real
where his desire can be extended in a desire for the other.
The distance maintained
from oneself to oneself
or from the unfinished self to the unpresented other
which must be endlessly aroused by desire,
is the background of the place
which must then be projected.
Here at last is a Reason for architecture,
sufficient to bring together the words of Cantor, Freud, Gödel, Lacan....,
and the architecture of the Mies pavilion,
of Corbusier in his final maturity (Ahmedabad, Chandigahr.... )
and Kahn!
End of the enclosure!
End of the column!
End of the volume!
All of Anselmi's architecture is
of lines,
of planes
and surfaces.
The end of the human-enclosure gathered around itself!
The end of the human-column, central to itself, like a point, facing everything!
The end of the human-volume opposing a clean interior to a foreign exterior!
And - at last! -a human exposed
to a sequence, a succession, and a path of 'lines' in the Real!
Finally, a human being exposed by the 'plan' to touch the void of the event.
to touch the emptiness of the event in the Real cut by this plan!
Finally, a human of 'surfaces’
bending and folding in the logic of the concepts of events in the Real.
Finally a human alive and in act!
Finally, a human who surrenders to the 'Real' of the place!
Marc Belderbos will definitely be linked
to this thought of architecture for life in action,
as he sensed it in Anselmi,
and which he has been working on ever since
without ever being able to go beyond it.
*
He returned, unfortunately, to Belgium in 1983.
The tension of the flat country is a miserable drizzle
compared to the history and the intellectual, social and political
space of Italy.
As a young man, he had lived through the 'years of lead'
there in Italy
in a certain fascination
for this proximity to a revolution
that wanted
a people of thought and acts of thought
rather than
a quiet people subject to the unjust law
of the obscure sclerosis of the 'Empire',
wavering quickly in the debasing cult of 'identity',
itself rapidly sinking into the destruction of the other.
He had seen Enrico Berlinguer ,
there in Italy,
in his deaf and powerful commitment to the darkness of politics
trying to hold, for the people,
communism by the raw material of his idea.
He had lived there in the fascination of Pasolini,
another man of dignity
and straightforwardly inclined
towards the stance and the defense
of the dignity of the anonymous,
and
of the primary matter of culture generating common people
who, in turn,
generate the common space
by the trace of their gestures
going back to antiquity.
Pasolini who had just been killed
by those of the obscure sclerosis and 'identity',
who were already plotting
and will blow up Bologna, Brescia, Milan in carnages....
He had felt
in the power of these figures and their speech
that Italy was to contain
the active fund of the disposition of the matter,
passing through time.
A kind of silent cult of the material arkhea thought.
Italy containing materially
the whole thread of the history
of thought and architecture
from Parmenides to the present day...
Italy then...
as a place ...
of the places of the first history of architecture
and as the link
in dress, speech and design,
to the raw material
going back to that which is ancient if not archaic to us.
*
But Marc Belderbos is in Belgium,
a country without history and without authority,
without any happiness
in the intellection of architecture.
He is alone.
He is still young
and without a pronounceable argument in this misery
where it seems to him that
too many figures-architects and figures-theorists
believe themselves to be elevated
when they don’t elevate nothing.
The playfulness, cordiality and courtesy of the academic inconsistency
is repugnant to him.
He only manages to think with very few people.
Jean Stillemans, who had studied with him, is already there
in a friendship hungry for consistency
and for the anchoring of knowledge.
Marc Belderbos teaches a little at the University
but alone among pretentious people
who give him back this contempt yet well-deserved.
Pierre Marchal,
philosopher, assistant of Jean Ladrière,
fascinated and shaped by silence,
appears then through his generous listening
and asks the right questions about architecture.
All around this one:
How is it that this stands?
A question that no other question precedes.
A question that indicates from the outset
that architecture is a matter of stance
and not of form in figure.
And thus of the dis-position of matters
rather than the com-position of figures.
Pierre Marchal
thinks, exchanges and works only in hypotheses.
He takes the 'hypothesis' as fertility
to the formulations of the approach to knowledge and its operation.
He opens up thought.
It does not close it.
The 'theses' are, for him, of the order of the other bygone world.
Theses are the enclosure of idealisms.
No more enclosures!
No more idealisms!
No more miserable idealistic transcendences for Pierre Marchal.
The open Real of the hypothesis,
an interrogative affirmation,
is the only fruitful one
and the only guarantor of
the immanence of truths.
Pierre Marchal is therefore there, a true pro-motor,
when Marc Belderbos begins to write a doctorate that is not a thesis.
*
This doctorate...
Yves Lepère looks to it. And reads.
But does not intervene.
René Lavendhomme,
the mathematician who is already thinking about Lieu du Sujet ' (Seuil),
is attentive and supports the theoretical consistency.
He understands that the text
wants to be mathematical,
cleared of realism,
that is to say, inaugural.
Luc Génicot, a realist and therefore conformist historian,
is unfortunately thin-skinned.
He does not see and does not understand
that this text is not about architecture
but about the operation of 'architecting'.
Marc Belderbos then left the university....
which did not keep him,
... by fear.
It is true that no 'master' of teaching
at the UCLouvain School of Architecture
has, at this time,
nor has he written anything important about architecture.
Marc Belderbos is writing his doctorate outside the university.
But Pierre Marchal is there,
and maintains,
word for word,
a dialectical conversation,
with reciprocal growth,
with Marc Belderbos and the text that is being written,
for a thousand days.
The text is hybrid.
It has an unexpected mathematical and poetic precision.
Marc Belderbos lets the text write itself.
He is rather 'vigilant' in stripping it of its 'author',
i.e. of everything that is not inaugural.
The text is finally called 'The Reason of the augury’
and is divided into three parts:
1- Resonance of Reason, or the stripping away of the commencement.
2- Stances at a distance, or the setting up of the commencement.
3- The unfolding of the commencement. (History of the European 'to architect').
The text was submitted in 1990.
The same academics who were afraid ... are still afraid
and do not know what to say or do.
They do not understand,
and will never understand.
Marc Belderbos himself
does not know
whether his text is
a step beyond knowledge
and an advance for thought.
He offers no defense.
Two years pass in misery and fear.
Pierre Marchal and Yves Lepère then presented the text
to Jean Ladrière who is the authority above all else.
Ladrière is not afraid.
He pronounces the word 'genius’
and writes what authority should be given
to 'The Reason of the augury’ (Read soon here).
He is president of the Jury and the doctorate is recognised at the end of 1992.
('La raison de l'augure' has recently been reworked
and will soon be published by 'Architecturer.net')
But outside the academic framework, Alain Badiou,
whose most beautiful book Marc Belderbos had read,
'Le Nombre et les Nombres',
as well as 'L'être et l'événement',
Marc Belderbos had read,
also reads the doctorate
and writes:
....your book gave me the feeling of being the first to
establish in thought the genius of ‘to architect’. (read here)
The words of Ladrière and Badiou are so dizzying
that Marc Belderbos does not believe them.
He cannot believe them either.
For he thinks of this doctorate as
if it were the first step of a child who has just risen,
but nothing more.
Powerful, but unaware and without authority.
Marc Belderbos will never recognize himself as an authority.
He will just spend his life taking feverish steps,
in a quest for consistency outside of all existence.
But here, with this doctorate,
a first phase of his life will be concluded.
*
Marc Belderbos' life as an architect is,
in a second phase,
a 'long' insistence which he will never know if it is
constant, faithful, persevering, obstinate or stubborn.
It looks like a series of attempts,
to draw,
to say,
to say better
and to draw well
of the primary matter
for architecture.
The primary stance of matter
which he also believes, without knowing it,
necessary
because
giving
the primary stance
of the anthrope-subject
becoming a capable Subject.
Primary stance
violently instituted
between the Real without any stance
to uphold,
in the first place,
by this inaugural notion of stance,
the capacity to establish
a Reality,
- out of the Real, out of Nature -,
that is,
to establish the Symbolic.
And Marc Belderbos is alone with this thought....
All the others think of architecture
in itself,
external to a 'human being’
in itself and a priori capable of judgement
in itself and a priori capable of distinguishing the beautiful.
All the others do not think of architecture
necessary
for the anthrop-subject,
for the stance of the anthrop-subject.
*
This second time, will remain
in the imprint of
two major thinkers in his eyes:
Alessandro Anselmi and Alain Badiou.
Alain Badiou,
whose work he has followed since the 1980s
and whose seminars he has attended since 1995.
Alessandro Anselmi,
whom he has been seeing since 1980.
The reception of their thought by Marc Belderbos
and their re-enunciation for the purposes of his enterprise,
constitute his biography in thought.
Here it is....
*
Alain Badiou and Alessandro Anselmi do not know each other.
But in the eyes of Marc Belderbos,
what unites Anselmi and Badiou
is the idea of communism.
Not the deficient communism
of the state regimes or the parties that have passed away
but the idea of communism.
It is an idea of life
which summons it and provokes it,
but does not reach it and does not kill it.
This idea is the idea
of an anthrope-subject that finds its life, or its subject
only in a kind of
multiple crossing with the lives of others
to the point that
his Being is
this multiple crossing of others.
It is therefore the idea of
a subject that does not exist in itself a priori.
Its existence,
that is to say, its becoming a 'capable subject',
is made of this multiple crossing of others.
Multiple crossing of others who are not only other anthropes-subjects.... :
Material or virtual sites can become mental sites
and allow events to occur,
the first of which, -necessary-,
is architecture,
whose existence allows the subject-anthrop
to discern himself from the Real.
Through this crossing of others,
the enclosure of identity on itself
is therefore foreign to him.
Foreign to this life and this Idea.
This life is never identical to itself ;
precisely because of this Idea.
For this 'subject'-anthrop is a priori
without subject and without object.
It must first 'find itself’
to have welcomed this multiple crossing that articulates it,
... as a verb would.
This is the idea of this subject.
This idea is like a verb.
This idea is like the verb
on which the architecture of the sentence is based.
The idea, in this sense,
finds or builds its subject and later its object.
And this idea,
like this life,
is sustained by
the crossing of the other and of others.
Of their multiple crossing.
Through all this, Henri Laborit's formula
‘The subject does not exist (a priori), it is the crossing of others’
is for Marc Belderbos a great and persistent theme of thought.
The subject itself does not exist a priori.
It is not central to itself.
If he believes that his mode of being
is the existence of itself by itself,
if he believes that he is
like an enclosure or like a column
pretentiously finished,
he goes astray.
He goes astray
in a pretended sufficiency of separate identity,
but of course wretchedly inadequate,
and thus in the necessity of the creation of a God
and
in the vision of the other
as a danger outside himself.
This leads from fear to war.
On the contrary,
if,
to be,
the way of the subject,
not central to itself,
is the 'crossing of others’
thus not gathering the being on itself,
then appears
the consistency of the common,
that is, of a whole communism.
And it appears as the only one to be dealt with!
The problem is on the side of the same
says Badiou in his Ethics.
This is true when it is about oneself.
The idea of communism says:
Do not be yourself!
Don't be identical to yourself!
Don't be in the enclosure of individualism.
Get away from yourself
and in the distance,
place the stay of the crossing of the others.
There you will find a being of desire... de-identified.
We see here
a very primitive summoning of life
in a vitality
of the 'local delocalisation' of the self,
of exposure to the other,
and the crossing of the other.
Only the non-animal anthrope ,
the subject anthrope,
can do this
-a local delocalisation-
outside the Real, outside Nature,
and live in his own heterotopia,
unfinished, infinite,
and thus immanent
and without god.
And all this, one feels,
is an extremely primitive idea.
Is an idea of primary authority.
Is an arkhè-.
The arkhè- of the arkhe-tekton
The arkhè- of architecture.
The 'local delocalisation'
probably indicates the same thought as
the 'non-renaissance centrality',
of Anselmi's architecture
or
the non-humanism
of Alain Badiou's thought
It indicates the passage
from the object enclosed in itself
to the thing in its stance,
devoid of particularisms
and raised
to the dignity of the common
or to the dignity of a truth for all.
The 'local delocalisation’
undoubtedly also indicates
the non-centrality of the subject to itself,
the basis of Alain Badiou's entire work,
according to Marc Belderbos,
which brings the subject and its thought
in a triple active or 'verbal' non-opposition:
Non-opposition between inside and outside.
Non-opposition between finite and infinite.
Non-opposition between face and depth.
In other words, a triple opening
active or structuring
like a verb:
Structuring opening between inside and outside.
Structuring opening between finite and infinite.
Structuring opening between face and depth.
Well, according to Marc Belderbos,
this was Anselmi's architectural work,
this was Badiou's work of thought.
These were
the support base
and the background, the resource for the revival
of Marc Belderbos's thought and work.
And it occupied the life of this thought.
*
All this took time....
This will be seen in the sequence of
of the various writings and architectural projects
of Marc Belderbos on this site.
All in a long insistence
on what is indicated above.
In the writings,
one will see it in the reading of these thoughts
in permanent maturation of the same theme.
In the projects,
it will be seen in the small inaugural ideograms
which synthesize a project.
None of them indicate a closed place.
None of them indicate an 'image'.
None of them indicates a figure naming 'something'.
Each ideogram indicates
an archetypal structure or 'stance'
that is always open.
Always in structuring opening...
Each ideogram expresses
an idea in unfinished opening
and not a finite concept.
And we can never
give a name to this idea.
For it is not a concept.
This idea is a stance
or a verb,
in essence open and unfinished.
By this...:
Because we see a verb or a stance,
one feels that it is out of the Real
which is without an indicated stance.
Because one does not see any concept to which one could give a name,
one feels very well that all that is outside the Symbolic where everything has a name.
Because no recognizable figure can be seen,
one feels that all that is outside the Imaginary.
This does not mean that the architecture of these projects
is outside the configuration
Real - Imaginary - Symbolic
which are all three at a distance from each other.
The Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic
are not in a heap.
There are at least three 'in-betweens':
- Between the Real and the Imaginary ,
there is an active passage from one state to another.
We could call this energy... the Spirit.
- Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic,
there is an active passage from one state to another.
We could call this energy... the nomination.
- Between the Real and the Symbolic
there is an active passage from one state to another.
We could call this energy... the verb.
The verb
in its primitive authority,
in its arkhè- .
In its arkhè-
quite necessary.
This,
this active passage,
this necessary interval,
the verb,
in its primitive authority,
in its arkhè- ,
in the arkhè-
quite concretely necessary.
is the architecture
with which Marc Belderbos was occupied
throughout his life as an architect.
Architecture just one step away from the Real,
underpinning the possibility of the Symbolic.
Badiou said this in an unprecedented way.
‘Architecture is the violent interval between the Real and the Symbolic.’
was the definition of
what architecture should be
that he proposed
during his conference
that Marc Belderbos organized in 2019
at the end of his academic work at UCLouvain.
(Text soon here).
A definition of unprecedented synthetic power and exigency....
that Marc Belderbos only approached with his long maxim:
‘Architecture
establishes
at one step of the Real
a first dis-position of matter
- dis - position called 'space' -
for the first well Being
of the anthrope-subject
that it, the Real, has there.’
It is clear that
architecture does not exist.
Its mode of being is not existence.
It is not a notion.
It is an operation.
It does not exist. It consists.
Like the verb.
It inaugurates the notion
of stance, of consistency
before anything else.
And it is therefore
outside the Real,
at one step of the Real
or
violently establishing
the interval betw een the Real and the Symbolic.
This definition by Badiou or
this maxim of Marc Belderbos
thus takes architecture as the arkhè-
necessary for the possibility of the stance of the Symbolic.
That is to say, in the end,
arkhè- necessary to anthropic life
in its distinction from animal life.
The Symbolic is completely foreign to it.
Arkhè- concretely necessary, therefore,
equivalent to an ethics
as a concrete primary authority
by which the anthrop lives
a non-animal anthropic life.
Strange equivalence between
Ethics and Architecture
both 'concrete primary authorities
by which the anthrop lives'.
...By allowing him a well Being
which is precisely....
to 'live by an Ethics'.
Marc Belderbos will develop this in detail in his long book,
The Reason for the augury,
published at the end of 2022.
*
This constancy
- his father, who was very prominent, was called Constant -
in his work and research
was noticed.
In 1995
Lode Janssens
recognized in his architecture a necessary consistency
for his St Lucas school in Ghent.
He called him to teach and kept him in his position.
This school became the Faculty of Architecture of the KULeuven
Jean Stillemans,
who became responsible for the architectural education at the KULeuven,
did the same.
Marc Belderbos will continue to teach at both universities until 2019.
In addition to the essential research described above,
he will participate in some thirty international colloquia throughout the world.
Outside of Belgium,
he will mainly focus on the question of
the relationship between architecture and ecology.
His work there was essentially to give the answer to the question,
‘Is there an ecological architectural space?’
In Belgium,
he participated in several colloquia
organised by the LAA
under the direction of Jean Stillemans.
The texts of these participations will be found on this site as it develops.
He was also editor of a colloquium at the KUL:
'The unthinkable doctorate'
which questioned the question of a doctorate
in architecture or architectural research.
Another moment of recognition for Marc Belderbos' work occurred in 1995
Geert Bekaert, a rare critic, published 'Contemporary Architecture in Belgium'.
A work by Marc Belderbos is on the cover....
And Bekaert's text about the work of Marc Belderbos is quite consistent.
*
There is one last point... that will suspend Marc Belderbos' life as an architect.
Marc Belderbos visited Japan a dozen times.
He was impressed by
the traditional architecture of
Sejima, Sanaa, Ryue Nishisawa, and Junio Ishigami. ….
In the architecture of these three contemporaries,
he noticed a continuation of tradition.
He analysed them at length
in his book 'The Reason for the augury’.
But he will be seized by what they were defending, in architecture, without knowing it :
'A non-opposition between inside and outside.
A non-opposition between finite and infinite.
A non-opposition between face and depth.
That is to say, a triple active or structuring opening like a verb
A structuring opening between inside and outside.
A structuring opening between finite and infinite.
A structuring opening between face and depth'.
i.e. the conditions of contemporary thought and architecture...
all this implied,
as these architects did,
to remove the mass from the matter
so that
this triple non-opposition
or
this triple structuring opening
are possible.
The Louvre Lens is a paradigm of this.
....
Marc Belderbos was struck by the fact that
he had not been able to say this earlier
in his architectural work.
All his architectural work
has never renounced
to the mass of the matter...
On the contrary, dramatically.
He was so seized by this realization
that he suspended his work as an architect...
Born as an architect in 1980,
Marc Belderbos ended his life as an architect...