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The firm ‘Architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’ is a very recent joint venture. Their approach is typically intuitive: they avoid the prevailing paradigm of the architectural concept and see design as searching through a pile of leaves until you find something. Imaginative flashes of inspiration, images that evoke associations here and there, for them these are a means of shifting boundaries, of departing from the framework of purely determinant pragmatism and fuelling the imagination and poetry.
The design and building process should at all times be able to respond to strict government regulations and the whims of the parties involved. These disruptive elements are not restrictive. On the contrary, they provide the input for a new direction, a unique intervention in the design and an extra layering of the architecture. The buildings by Architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu are actually never quite finished: their incompleteness gives their users the freedom to intervene and stimulates their creativity.
Their renovations of single-family homes, their modifications to the urban fabric of Ghent for the dance studios for Les Ballets C de la B and their transformation of the ‘Schermenhuis’ scenery store at the Bourlaschouwburg in Antwerp have not gone unnoticed in our part of the world. In the meantime their work is also enjoying international success. In 2006 Herzog and De Meuron and Ai Wei Wei asked them to design a 1000 sq. m. villa in Koakoashina, a new quarter to be developed in China. In 2010 the Japanese curator Kazuyo Seijima invited them to compile a presentation for the twelfth architectural biennale in Venice.
The exhibition at deSingel concentrates on their most recent work. The aim is not to provide a retrospective or a rounded story, but to examine particular themes and to take a snapshot of the still early shared career of this trio of architects.