ArchiLectures | Jo Van Den Berghe

In his lecture, Jo Van Den Berghe will elaborate on Studio Anatomy, the design-research studio he runs at his home university in Belgium.

Studio Anatomy connects research in architecture with architectural education and architectural practice and looks at architecture beyond its outer appearance, beneath the skin, and critically questions the too speedy nature at the surface of the things we see (in architecture)—the superficiality of the world—by cutting into and under the skin of things (architecture). Alberto Pérez-Gòmez suggests that the section is of a foremost importance in the architect’s work, as a prediction on the casting of shadows, pointing at the anatomic nature of the section that, applied by the architect, “break[s] the skin of things in order to show” (Pérez-Gòmez 2006), completing his argument with Merleau-Ponty, “how the things become things, how the world becomes a world” (Merleau-Ponty 1964). This cutting into substance is resistant, hence it slows down our acting and intensifies our thinking. Slowing instead of speeding. Because slowing permits one to perceive, absorb and embody longer, better, deeper. This cutting implies that the architecture under investigation is being anatomised and better understood, and by doing so, new embodied knowledge emerges.
References:

• Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and Mind, in: The Primacy of Perception, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., US, p. 181.
• Pérez-Gòmez, A. (2006). The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Presence and Representation, in: Questions of Perception: Phenomenology in Architecture, Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Pérez-Gòmez, William Stout Publishers, San Francisco, US, p. 22.

Architect Jo Van Den Berghe Ph.D (1961)

Teaches experimental architectural design at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels/Ghent, Belgium, in the experimental studio (Studio Anatomy).

He works as a researcher and parttime professor at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Australia and Barcelona, Spain, in the field of Techné and Poiesis in making architecture (the poetics of making).

He is a visiting professor at Politecnico di Milano, Queen’s University Belfast and EPFL Lausanne.

He is a reflective practitioner-architect with a critical architectural practice in Belgium since 1986.
johan.vandenberghe@kuleuven.be

University:
University of Leuven, Faculty of Architecture campus Sint-Lucas, Ghent/Brussels, Belgium.