The Bruges 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.Damiaan Vanhoutte 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.
Damiaan Vanhoutte said, “The works of Russian artist Malevich transcend figuration, narrative, and recognizability, ultimately reaching an abstract dimension that encompasses mathematical and artistic concepts such as proportion, scale, modulation, composition, and balance, while also being linked to specific content.” The term “Suprematism,” as defined by Malevich, refers to the dominance of pure emotional experience in art. In their design approach, they also aim to achieve this level of abstraction and transcendence, always starting from a functional analysis of the project and its surrounding environment, integrating an artistic perspective to form an authentic original concept that is closely connected to its space and context.
