Wim Cuyvers
(1958)
Belgium
  

 

 

 Wim Cuyvers is graduated with a degree in architecture from Ghent in 1982. After working in New York with Preston Phillips and Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown, he worked as an architect, author and lecturer in Belgium and in the Netherlands. He has lived in France since 2000, teaching since 2003 at the Paris-Malaquais School of Architecture. His many publications Architecture plaisir nécrophile, Ing-society, Learning from Sarajevo… focus on architecture and urbanism in border areas. As the author of various projects such as schools and private homes, he has also designed cemeteries. Wim Cuyvers’ work permits an interaction with the deceased. His practice, called “amor fati” or “love of fate” tries to break down the barrier/frontier between the quick and the death. In 2003, at the Hague, in the Netherlands, as part of the event The City, the Gap and the Regulations, dedicated to socio-geographical and urbanistic aspects in contemporary planning, Wim Cuyvers presented the project The Impossibility of Planning. In collaboration with Stroom, centre for visual arts in The Hague and the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the project exhibited 30 analyses carried out by groups of students on the Transvaal neighbourhood in the Hague, a working-class area in the process of being rebuilt. In tandem, the works produced by a workshop organized in Belgrade in 2001 under his direction were also put on view. Focusing on the analyses of the situation in Belgrade after the end of the Communist era with its planned economy, the workshop dealt with issues arising from the process of spontaneous and illegal occupation and was confronted with the work of a few artists and architects. In collaboration with the Belgian photographer Marc de Blieck, Wim Cuyvers shares his fascination for public spaces. Their works consist in studying a same place within their own ways and come to a form that is specific for their respective medium. Bringing these forms together, they are mirroring themselves and rather reflecting many visions of the spot.