19 — 24 March 2013, Dubai

images | biography | publication

«The characteristic OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen image is a single-point perspective, produced in advance of a project’s physical realization by means of computer-based collage or after the fact by the studio’s long-time collaborator, the photographer Bas Princen. In both, the deliberate perspectival construction and control of colour engenders a highly emblematic quality, leveraging the project free of the contingencies of site and function and claiming it for the accumulating oeuvre. The latter collages of Mies van der Rohe are an obvious reference point but a no less direct influence are the paintings produced by another European living in postwar America, David Hockney.» - Ellis Woodman, 2012 (excerpt from ‘Picturing the present’, 2G magazine, N.63, p. 5/6)

«While every attempt of making architecture seems to drift off in rhetorics of programmatic organization and ironic provocation, form and space as such have become a rare good. In our projects we try to counter this by making direct and precise spatial proposals, formal compositions without rhetoric. This literal architecture aims for a phenomenological experience, perhaps despite of its program». - OFFICE states.

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen and Bas Princen have been awarded the Silver Lion for the most promising young participant of the exhibition ‘people meet in architecture’ at the 12th venice architecture biennale, 2010, curated by Kazuyo Sejima. OFFICE was also responsible for the content of the Belgian pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 2008, whose artistic director was the American Aaron Betsky and whose theme was ‘out there.architecture beyond building’. Selected recent and ongoing projects are the construction and conversion of 2 darain in Bahrain, 4 apartment buildings in Antwerpwork and the completion of the Weekend House in Merchtem, Belgium. OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen was founded in 2002 by David Van Severen and Kersten Geers. They are based in Brussels, BE.

Bas Princen is an artist and photographer living and working in Rotterdam and recently in Singapore. He was educated as industrial designer at the Design Academy Eindhoven and later studied architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Since then, through the use of photography, his work focuses on urban landscape in transformation, researching the various forms, outcomes and imaginaries of changing urban space.

Recent exhitbions include: Collaborations, Arsenale 13th Venice Biennale 2012, Reservoir, deSingel Antwerp 2011, Five Cities, Depo, Instanbul 2010, Refuge, Storefront for art and architecture NY 2010; Invisible frontier, AUT, Insbruck 2008; Nature as Artifice, Kroller Muller Museum, Otterloo and Aperture Foundation, New York 2009; Spectacular City, Nai, Rotterdam, 2006; The Venice Bienale of Architecture 2004 2006, 2010 and 2012