The Bruges (B) based office Govaert & Vanhoutte Architects revolves around the synergy between Benny Govaert and Damiaan Vanhoutte. They blend in architecture and particularly this interaction between them brings their designs on a higher level.The studio with eighteen co-workers creates mostly Belgian projects that gradually engulf the West of the country, have been published worldwide and have won numerous awards at home and abroad.Invited by Yinji, he taught us online for three hours with the theme of "Simple wins over complex".

Not only the elegant horizontality or the consequent composition of open and closed surfaces, but also the delicate details and sober structures constitute their modest, but recognisable signature. Simultaneously transparent and corporal, their project define the coordinates of space. De architects slide with lines, planes and borders to the essence of spatial perception. Thanks to a dozen sensitive heritage sites on its curriculum, the Bruges based architecture office shows her empathy for soft passages between present and history.

“The work of the Russian artist Malevich transcends the figurative, the narrative, the identifiable… to attain an abstract dimension of both mathematical  and artistic concepts like proportion, dimension, modulation, composition, balance ... With suprematism he meant the domination of the pure emotional experience in art.

They also aim to attain this abstraction, this transcendence … in our schemes, ever starting from a functional analysis of the program and the surroundings, along with artistic vision, resulting in an authentic concept that remains linked to its content and location.”

The detailing in their work is a long term investigation, a continuous search as to how a combined set of architectural elements can resist mechanical forces, withstand the power of nature, fulfils its function within the whole, and at the same time give them the comfort of an aesthetic image.

This is a process of transgression. It is a continuous process in which different aspects evolve and give direction towards the aimed result. While gaining insight in the various aspects of creating a building, details evolve simultaneously, like development in production and technology does. It is this on-going search for new materials, the investigation and experimentation with these materials, and the construction and evaluation on site, that result in how buildings endure over time.

Their creativity is performed through the way they choose to put specific architectural elements together. They take these elements into account in terms of the role they fulfil in the construction and perception of a building. 

As they pursue a certain level of abstraction in our buildings, they cope with detailing in the same way.  Each part and each execution must, at its specific level, contribute to the pursued building concept. Aiming at abstraction in detailing implies that they part with all non-essential aspects. They consider the quantity and presence of materials, their physical qualities and properties, and the way they can be assembled. Due to the nature of the detailing they often push the chosen materials to their limits.

In striving for innovation, They are in constant contact with engineers, production firms and contractors prepared to participate in the detailing process. The speed of this progress is strongly related to the evolution of our building concepts and the scale of our projects, nevertheless they maintain the steadiness of abstraction and strive for strong geometry.