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| Martine DE MAESENEER |
Martine De Maeseneer Architects exists this year 2013 25 years. Their first public building of a certain scale, the Bronks Youth Theatre, situated in the centre of Brussels, was awarded in 2011 as the first ever Belgian finalist in the European Mies van der Rowe Award for Contemporary Architecture. So far their journey followed a limited edition of realisations of private houses, office buildings, social housing, all of them extensively published.
Martine De Maeseneer Architects is not a compulsive builder. The practice mediates between ‘theorisation’ and ‘realisation’. How can we build in ‘difference’ (with an ‘a’) in our practice as a self-regulating machine? It is a question about quantity (also), but then of a different order.
In order to reach this, we started looking for a medium that isn’t preoccupied with form, image and Gestalt.
As our motto we state that ‘context’ alone is not enough, that projects should at the least look conceptual, that they should be imbedded in text.
What manifested itself in the beginning as very spontaneous side remarks/doodles, we gradually deepened and extended toward an autonomous operating language. Within our practice we continuously search for a broader field of ‘patterns’, ‘motives’, ‘logos’, ‘plots’ and ‘timbres’. — Words with an architectural resonance - which are an expression of a social, cultural and political involvement and expertise at large. This kind of (in) directness works.
Since 2000 MDMA participated in about 25 architectural competitions launched in Belgium and abroad, and has been working in-between on an architectural theory. MDMA is the author of two small books – The In-di-visible Space (Antwerp 1993) and Ideality-3-Lost (Brussels 1997) and has published about 10 essays in an international forum of books and magazines.
MDMA has lectured widely across the world, counting in cities as Kyoto, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Syracuse, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Shanghai, Haifa, Volos, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Breda, Arnhem, Maastricht, Tilburg, London, Berlin, Dessau, Dublin, Oslo, Antwerp, Hasselt, Leuven, Ghent and Brussels.
De Maeseneer has been teaching at the Architectural Association in London and the Academy of Building Art Tilburg - and is teaching since 1990 at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, campus LUCA, Brussels/Ghent.
She received a Master of Science in Architecture form the Bartlett, University College London, and received her diploma as an architect from W&K Sint-Lucas Ghent.
An individual exhibition was held on their work in the Singel International Art Centre Antwerp (1993), along with the publication of a catalogue/monograph ‘The In-di-visible Space’ (105p), introduced by R.E. Somol. In 1997 there was the individual exhibition in Encore...Bruxelles, together with a book publication ‘Ideality-3-Lost’ (135p).
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