Experience shows that, more often than not, we use an atlas in a way that combines two apparently dissimilar gestures: We open it, first, to look for precise information. But once we find that information, we do not necessarily put the atlas down; rather, we follow different pathways this way and that. We do not close the collection of plates until we have wandered a while, erratically, with no particular intention, through its forest, its labyrinth, its treasure. Until the next time, which will be just as fruitful or useless. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science ¹ Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3.

Uscendo dal negozio sono incerto. Dovrei continuare il mio percorso verso l’università, secondo i consigli pertinenti del libraio antiquario, per non parlare della biblioteca comunale. Ma è un momento in cui sento maggiormemente la tentazione di perdermi, di vagare. Forse non c’è un percorso, ma solo un’intermittenza tra la probabilità e l’improbabilità. È come se ogni spostamento lo decidessi lí per lí, per vedere dove porta, e questa scoperta, poi, non fosse altro che l’inizio che cercavo. Vorrei mantenere una certa inerzia, con piccole spinte indispensabili e sufficienti. … Ma quanto posso perdermi? E quanto posso deviare? Daniele Del Giudice, Lo stadio di Wimbledon. ² ‘Leaving the shop, I am hesitant. I should continue on my way to the university, following the pertinent advice of the antiquarian bookseller, not to mention the municipal library. But it is a moment in which I feel most tempted to get lost, to wander. Perhaps there is no path, only an intermittence between probability and improbability. It is as if I would decide each move there and then, to see where it leads, and this discovery, then, was nothing more than the beginning I was looking for. I would like to maintain a certain inertia, with small pushes that are indispensable and sufficient … But how far can I get lost? And how far can I deviate?’. Daniele Del Giudice, Lo Stadio di Wimbledon (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1983), 8–9. English translation my own.

The composite culture of Christian Kieckens

It is far from easy to situate Christian Kieckens’s architectural production and theoretical reflection within the Flemish disciplinary landscape of recent decades. Rigorous and austere as an architect, Kieckens was also a lecturer and scholar with a wide multiplicity of interests. In Stoà, he writes:

The staging of Karl-Ernst Hermann, the theme of inertia in Jan Fabre’s work, the spatial effect in Francesco Borromini’s architecture, the polyphonic music of Perotin, the mythical in Arvo Pärt’s compositions, the mathematical in Stoneborough-Wittgenstein, Les larmes d’acier by Marie-Jo Lafontaine, the melancholy of Venice, the thematic in Pieter De Bruyne’s work, the speed of Milan, the topical in Neville Brody’s graphics, the classics of Rome, the night photography of Manel Esclusa, the structures in Peter Greenaway’s films, the interstices in Japanese Zen gardens, the beauty of Prague, the video clips of Jean-Baptiste Mondino, eternal absence, the illusion of the Baroque, conservationism in the architecture of Adolf Loos, the richness of natural stone, the liveliness of Barcelona, the static nature of café culture in Vienna, the construction of William Forsythe’s ballets, the metamorphosis of Peter Eisenman and Hiromi Fujii, the proportions in Giuseppe Terragni’s work, the bustle of New York, the world of the monochrome, the silence of the past … form a STOA in which we try, at appropriate intervals, to capture our own image. ³ Christian Kieckens, “STOA,” Stichting Architectuurmuseum S/AM Bulletin no. 90 (1990), 10. English translation my own.

Figure 7.1: Christian Kieckens, Postcard composition from the book, Christian Kieckens. The place and the building, Antwerp, 1997.

Rather than as a historian, Kieckens operatively collected and applied this wide body of themes and references as an architect. As in a curatorial approach towards existing materials, Kieckens’s disciplinary position seems to lie more in the selection and collection of his repertoire than in single materials. This aspect of collecting, mainly visual, deeply permeated all Kieckens’s ways of thinking and doing architecture. It is this form of thought, this cognitive modality, that became crucial both from the point of view of Kieckens’s design methodology and of its transmissibility, but also autonomously, for its own epistemological value, in respect to the culture of the time and to its political and philosophical horizons.

In between overt and tacit forms of knowledge

Understanding Kieckens’ architectural knowledge and practices requires first of all comprehending his cultural context, which is not only that of Flanders, but also the much broader and international one he carefully selected and assembled. In his essay, Il formaggio e i vermi (The Cheese and the Worms), ⁴ Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976). Carlo Ginzburg investigates how a peculiar mentality, grounded on a series of uncommon religious practices, emerged in a small town in northern Italy towards the end of the sixteenth century. This is precisely the ‘cosmogony of the cheese and the worms’, the metaphorical image used by Domenico Scandella called Menocchio, a farmer and miller from Montereale Valcellina, in order to describe the formation of the cosmos. For these ideas, Menocchio was tried and condemned to the stake by the Sant’Uffizio. Ginzburg based his study mainly on the records of the Inquisition trials. Although they belong to the archives of repression, and thus to sources that are usually deformed or at least highly filtered by the dominant culture, the fidelity with which Menocchio’s confessions were transcribed allowed Ginzburg to access an oral culture that would have been otherwise lost. These documents were crucial for understanding the substance of Menocchio’s ideas and thus for retracing their possible genealogy. Ginzburg analyses the crucial exchange between the codified culture that expresses through explicit language, i.e., that of official historical narratives, and the more elusive and mainly oral one that remains substantially implicit. Questioning the separation of these parallel forms of knowledge, Ginzburg demonstrates how the continuous and reciprocal exchange between them is fundamental to the construction of culture and mentality as a whole. In this regard, the trial records establish a fundamental bridge between the two forms of knowledge, the written and the oral, but also the overt and the tacit.

The resistance encountered when approaching Kieckens’s knowledge seems to be deeply related to the crucial tension between these two dimensions. It does not depend, then, on the lack of linguistic formalisations, but on their very nature, which is grounded in a crucial set of parallel disciplinary practices and which is therefore substantially associative and analogical.

Images and words

Kieckens’s texts are mainly composed of free-standing parts, quotations, and anecdotes, strictly interlinked but still retaining a certain autonomy. Like his repertoire of interests and references, they are in turn constellations of ideas that collectively outline an attitude towards the discipline without resorting to statements or prescriptions.

The thought of the author does not emerge in a direct and general manner, but reveals itself gradually, through the interposed mediation of the examples he addresses. Kieckens may be said to merely evoke the general by means of the specific, according to a kind of abductive process. ⁵ In relation to the notion of abduction and its epistemological value within scientific method, see Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–35), 6:452–85. See also Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung (Wien: Springer, 1934). The choice and ordering of the references on which Kieckens focuses become therefore crucial, alongside the motivations that drove him to take an interest in one thing instead of something else.

Figure 7.2: Christian Kieckens, Office in Handelskaai 30, Brussels. The main office space on the ground floor, photo by Reiner Lautwein. © Reiner Lautwein.

The nature of Kieckens’s disciplinary repertoire is substantially visual. The repertoire directly corresponds to the images with which he always surrounded himself, the photographs and slides taken during his travels, the clippings and the postcards that he collected, the prints with which he used to work with the students. The assemblage and display of these visual materials in space seems to be the common denominator of Kieckens’s key practices. The compositions on the black panels hanging at his office and at the university in Antwerp reflect the same associative structure of his texts and, more generally, of his knowledge (Fig. 7.1, 7.2).

Kieckens’s approach is, then, substantially based on the reciprocal relationship that is at play between the repertoires of references conveyed by the images, and the words that describe them. The tacit core of Kieckens’s thought lies precisely in this intricate yet fundamental knot between images and language.

The visual agency of the S/AM

In Le geste et la parole (Gesture and Speech), André Leroi-Gourhan reflects on the instrumental nature of images within an anthropological and epistemological perspective, dwelling in particular on the key tacit relationship they establish with language. ⁶ In respect to the relationship between technique, language, and images, see in particular André Leroi-Gourhan, “Language Symbols,” in Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 187–219. These are two strongly complementary aspects that, in parallel with developments in technology but also with different forms of collecting, overlap, diverge, and then reunite, at least partially.

Together with speech, Leroi-Gourhan interprets images as cultural tools that allow individuals to actively participate in the collective dimension of the social body of which they are part. ⁷ In respect to the social role of images, see in particular Leroi-Gourhan, “Introduction to a Paleontology of Symbols,” in Gesture and Speech, 269–81; Leroi-Gourhan, “The Symbols of Society,” in Gesture and Speech, 349–63. Through the sensory, motor, and visual synthesis with these material supports, humans contribute to the construction of their own social and cultural awareness. The very idea of beauty, the aesthetic value we associate with objects and images, thus seems essentially utilitarian, as it makes possible the affective insertion of the individual within his community:

Without language coming into play at all, the color of an individual’s tie will show his position within a human group as precisely as the robin’s red breast in a society of birds. But unlike physiological or technical features, the wearing of a vestimentary distinguishing mark is a symbol that gives rise to several social images at once. As a characteristic of function it lies just inside the technical range; as a portable and conventional badge it comes very close to figurative representation. That is why we have placed social aesthetics at the point of contact between the technical and the figurative spheres … The status of language at each stage of this sequence is interesting. Of all branches of philosophy, aesthetics has always found it most difficult to find expressions in words. When it succeeds, it is by evocation, by relying on the reader’s imagination and experience to supply the sounds, forms, and gestures that words can conjure up but not reconstitute. Language, it seems, is not adequate for expressing the aesthetic. ⁸ Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 273–74.

Figure 7.3: Christian Kieckens, scenography for the exhibition ‘Architetti (della Fiandra)’, curated by Marc Dubois, Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, 1991. © Flanders Architecture Institute, archive collection Flemish Community, 2022.

This interpretative framework applies equally to both prehistoric wall paintings and the prints and architectural representations that have been so decisive for Kieckens and for the disciplinary developments of recent decades, thus offering a possible alternative or at least complementary interpretation. Substantially based on visual materials, Kieckens’sactivity of disciplinary promotion with the Stichting Architectuurmuseum S/AM foundation perfectly shows the social and cultural horizon of his agency. Founded and directed from 1983 to 1991 together with Marc Dubois, the S/AM played a crucial role in the construction of a shared disciplinary culture in Flanders. This was done through an intense activity of publications, exhibitions, and architectural journeys that rapidly established a new community of practice. The culmination of this experience was the setting of the exhibition, ‘Architetti (della Fiandra)’, at the Belgian pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia in 1991 (Fig. 7.3). The exhibition constituted a moment of international recognition for the community of young Flemish architects, a community that was as varied and fragmented as its underlying architectural culture. ⁹ The exhibition included works by Luc Deleu & T.O.P. – Office; A.W.G. – bOb Van Reeth; Stéphane Beel; Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem; Eugeen Liebaut; Marie José Van Hee; Henk De Smet and Paul Vermeulen; Xaveer De Geyter, Giedo Driesen, Jan Meersman, Jan Thomaes; and a final epilogue by Kieckens himself, who presented his competition proposal, ‘Le ali del leone’.

Forêt DesCartes

The Kieckens archive at the VAi holds a peculiar object that seems to perfectly summarise the conceptual and operative functioning of Kieckens’s visual practices. The Forêt DesCartes is a prototype of Kaartenstander (postcard display) designed by Kieckens in 1995 and part of a larger series of objects entitled Jardin Divers (Fig. 7.4, 7.5). The object is extremely simple: it consists of an MDF panel with maple veneer, on which are inserted sixteen postcard holders made of bent iron rods arranged in a regular 6×4-cm grid.

Figure 7.4: Christian Kieckens, Forêt DesCartes, postcard stand prototype, 1995.

It is quite clear that the object is not about design, but rather a conceptual and artistic operation. The Forêt DesCartes is a spatial metaphor of the overall architectural paradigm of Kieckens, an operative tool for producing and transmitting architectural knowledge through the collection of images and their re-composition in space.

Figure 7.5: Christian Kieckens, Forêt DesCartes, current state of the object.

The play on words of its title – between DesCartes, of cards, and the name of René Descartes – stages again the tension between two different modalities of architectural knowing: on one side, rational knowledge — that is the Cartesian method, the 6×4-cm grid on which the postcards holders are mounted — on the other, imaginative knowledge, or visual knowledge — that is the ‘forest of cards’, or the free complexity of images that can be arranged on the card holders on the basis of the previous grid. Kieckens’s disciplinary attitude seems to lie precisely between the two, as a continuous reflection on their limits and on the possibility of their reciprocal exchange and implementation.

In his chapter, ‘Interferences’, Raymond Balau reflects on the images employed by Kieckens in his various visual practices. He writes:

These postcards are images Christian Kieckens receives from people, like Marc Dubois, who know his preoccupations, and they equally constitute winks in various directions. In the studio he occupied till 1995, next to rows of hundreds of CDs, these postcards covered two walls converging in a corner. This visible abundance is an indication of the pleasure of playing with images, ones that speak of art and of architecture … It is a fragment of an imaginary museum … The landscape of his references can be repeatedly recomposed without losing identity and backed up by a connective potential whose effectiveness is in proportion to a fundamental curiosity towards creation. ¹⁰ Raymond Balau, “Interferences,” in Christian Kieckens: The Place and the Building, ed. Christian Kieckens (Antwerp: Internationaal Kunstcentrum de Singel, 1997), 111–29.

Balau further identifies the act of displaying as a key cross-cutting aspect for Kieckens. All the ‘apparently secondary aspects in Christian Kieckens’s work’, such as ‘the postcards, the books, the sketches, the objects, the furniture, the photographs and the exhibition layouts’, seem to ‘demonstrate a central preoccupation: to exhibit’.

The atlas and the museum

There is a structural affinity between Kieckens’s visual compositions and the panels adopted by Aby Warburg for his Atlas Mnemosyne. ¹¹ See Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – Das Original (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2020). Warburg uses this method to visually investigate the permanence and migration of a series of recurring themes across cultural topographies and centuries. Comparison and analogy make it possible to relate even heterogeneous and distant materials. The panel becomes the open field, the physical and conceptual support on which images are freely composed, where visual and formal affinities are simultaneously attempted, verified, and staged.

The tradition of visual studies of Warburg’s iconology also influences Georges Didi-Huberman, the French art historian and curator with whom Kieckens personally worked in Le Fresnoy in 2001. ¹² Kieckens designed the layout for the exhibition, ‘Fables du lieu’, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing in 2001. Within the field of iconology, Didi-Huberman worked precisely on the aspect of visual collection that is present in the Atlas, in particular in relation to contemporary artistic, curatorial, and museographic practices. ¹³ See, in particular, Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Displayed with a large-scale video projection at Le Fresnoy in 2012, Didi-Huberman’s spatial re-enactment of Warburg’s panel 42 is a meaningful example of operative reflection on this visual approach and on its contemporary legacy.

Kieckens’s interest in Warburg’s and Didi-Huberman’s reflections is also confirmed by ‘Mnemosyne’, his last master open studio at the university of Antwerp,  in which he also precisely addressed the idea of the Musée Imaginaire, following Marcel Broodthaers and André Malraux. ¹⁴ The open studio took place in the academic year 2015–2016. A draft collection of the students’ works, never published, is conserved at the Kieckens Kabinet at the Flemish Architecture Institute VAi. For the notion of Musée Imaginaire, see André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: Le Musée Imaginaire (Geneva: Skira, 1947).

Words and things

Kieckens extensively applied the disciplinary method of the Forêt DesCartes to his teaching within the seminar, ‘Words and Things’, held at the University of Antwerp from 2009 to 2016. The title of the seminar refers directly to Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses. ¹⁵ Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

Figure 7.6: Klaartje Kempenaers, Image collection for the seminar, ‘Words and Things’, Prof. Christian Kieckens and Jan Thomaes, Artesis Hogeschool, Antwerp, AY 2011-2012.

The exercise given to the students consisted of collecting and spatially ordering a repertoire of images and quotations with the aim of reflecting on their own position towards the discipline (Fig. 7.6). The reference to Foucault evokes the crucial importance of the selection of ideas, references, and themes, in respect to their correspondence with the epistemological paradigm of their time. In the first introduction to the class, Kieckens quoted Foucault: ‘resemblance, excluded from knowledge since the seventeenth century, still constitutes the outer edge of language: the ring surrounding the domain of that which can be analysed, reduced to order and known. Discourse dissipates this murmur [of resemblance] but without it we could not speak’. ¹⁶ Ibid., 67–71.

Resemblance, which is the basic principle of analogy, is the main tool of imagination, in the same way that logical discourse is crucial to rational knowledge. In the exercise proposed by Kieckens, the words and the things are placed side by side according to their visual and conceptual resemblance, in a way that is substantially tacit.

Figure 7.7: Christian Kieckens, Roma Memoria, collage, from S/AM Stichting Architektuurmuseum Bullettin 3, no. 3, Gent, 1986.

Figure 7.8: Paul Robbrecht en Hilde Daem, Klein Openluchtmuseum voor Architektureen, from: S/AM Stichting Architektuurmuseum, Monography 1. Architektuur Musea, Gent, 1983.

The fragmented structural principle which is the basis of the Forêt DesCartes and the ‘Words and Things’ exercise is also significantly mirrored in a series of coeval theoretical representations. Kieckens’s collage, Roma Memoria, published on the cover of S/AM Bulletin 3, is perhaps the most emblematic (Fig. 7.7). ¹⁷ Stichting Architektuurmuseum S/AM Bullettin 3, no. 3 (1986). The image consists of a plan collage of several Roman architectures which are assembled on an empty white background. In a different form, it is once again a repertoire of references freely composed on the plain surface of the page. The fragmented and synchronic structure of ancient Rome provides the archetypal model through which this repertoire can be staged as an urban landscape. Rome and Roman architecture are significantly present in the publications of the S/AM from the beginning, from the first S/AM publication of 1983, which enigmatically closed with a plan  of the Villa Adriana. ¹⁸ The discovery of the plan’s photocopy in Kieckens’s archive shows his key role in such a decision. In the photocopy, the early-twentieth century survey of the Villa Adriana by the Rome school of Engineers is significantly associated with Giovanni Battista De Rossi’s 1538 plan of the city, one of the urban depictions in which the fragmented nature of the city is rendered more evidently.

Within this first issue, the corresponding composite attitude emerges particularly in the ‘Klein Openluchtmuseum’ project by Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem (Fig. 7.8). ¹⁹ Together with Kieckens, Marc Dubois, Marie-José Van Hee, Paul Robbrecht, and Hilde Daem are part of ‘generation 74’, so called because they all graduated from the Sint Lucas School of Architecture in Gent in 1974. See Caroline Voet et al., eds., Autonomous Architecture in Flanders (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016). As an architectural Forêt DesCartes, the project is constituted by a set of self-standing pavilions freely composed on a squared podium. The association of visual practices, collage representations, and design compositions is crucially important because it establishes a possible direct link between Kieckens’s methodology and the operative dimension of the discipline.

The international communities of Composite Presence

Figure 7.9: Christian Kieckens, Zoeken Denken Bouwen, opening page, Ludion, Gent, 2001.

The identification of the compositional theme of fragmentation further shows how Flanders was closely interconnected with the international and European disciplinary landscape of the 1970s and 1980s. As is clear from his library, Kieckens was carefully looking at the architectural culture of the most active disciplinary centres of the time.

Figure 7.10: Christian Kieckens, Zoeken Denken Bouwen, detail of the page with the collage, City of Composite Presence, by Hans Kolhoff and David Griffin, Ludion, Gent, 2001.

A clear connection with Colin Rowe can be identified first of all in the close similarity of the collage Roma Memoria with the City of Composite Presence by Hans Kollhoff and David Griffin, which was included at the beginning of Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City, published by MIT Press in 1978. ²⁰ Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). Kieckens significantly positioned the City of Composite Presence at the centre of the composition of open books that we find at the beginning of his monograph, Zoeken, Denken, Bouwen, published in 2001 (Fig. 7.9, 7.10). ²¹ Christian Kieckens, ed., Christian Kieckens – Zoeken denken bouwen (Gent: Ludion, 2001). The double-page with the books shows once again how the disciplinary reflection by Kieckens was not a univocal theory of architecture, but was made of many parallel fragments coexisting beside one another.

Figure 7.11: Aldo Rossi, ‘Acropoli di Zeebrugge’, competition model for the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, 1989. © Fondazione Aldo Rossi.

The connection of Kieckens with Rowe further confirms the link with Aby Warburg’s iconology. In fact, before moving to the United States, Colin Rowe did his MA at the Warburg Institute in London under the supervision of Rudolf Wittkower, and was substantially influenced by the methodologies that he studied and applied there. ²² See Katia Mazzucco, “1941 English Art and the Mediterranean: A Photographic Exhibition by the Warburg Institute in London,” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–28. The panels used for the exhibition, ‘English Art and the Mediterranean’, curated by Rudolf Wittkower and Fritz Saxl in 1941, are a very meaningful example of the visual approach of Iconology applied to exhibition display. ²³ In relation to the possible correspondence between visual practices and architectural outcomes, i.e., between the composition of the images and the composition of spaces, the panel, ‘The Italianised Architecture of Inigo Jones and his School’, shows a peculiar affinity between the pattern of the images’ arrangement, much more symmetrical and central than the one adopted by Warburg for his Mnemosyne Atlas, and the planimetric layout of the Palladian villas which are presented. The impact of this visual culture on Rowe is significantly present in his book, Collage City, which is structurally  grounded in the comparative use of a wide apparatus of images.

Together with Rowe, another key influence for Kieckens was Aldo Rossi. The consistent collection of materials on and by Rossi that is conserved in the Kieckens Kabinet clearly demonstrates this aspect of Kieckens’s interest. In Aldo Rossi, the relationship between collage practices and design strategies, both at the scale of the city and of architecture, is indeed fundamental. The several Città analoghe as well as the many engravings and drawings of nature morte all share a common fragmented structure with Rossi’s architectural compositions.

Figure 7.12: Pieter De Bruyne, ‘Ruimtelijke Constructie III’, 1983. © Design Museum Gent.

The model for the Zeebrugge terminal competition, the ‘Acropoli di Zeebrugge’, in turn resonating with the much earlier spatial compositions by Pieter De Bruyne, first mentor of Kieckens at the Sint Lucas school of Gent, appears as a meaningful volumetric and spatial translation of the same architectural theme (Fig. 7.11, 7.12).Within this wider transatlantic context, images and artefacts worked as crucial vectors of tacit knowledge, simultaneously conveying formal and conceptual contents between the respective communities of practice.

Tacit methods for addressing tacit knowledge

A key question arises at this stage: which methods should be applied to grasp the specificity of Kieckens’s practices? Following Ginzburg, the fundamental hypothesis assumed by the research was that for an effective understanding of Kieckens’s disciplinary position, it was not possible to limit the research to a logical–rational enquiry based on literary evidence, but necessary to resort to the same tacit knowledge employed in his practices, according to a principle of substantial homogeneity between research object and methods. The traditional bibliographical and archival methods applied in the first stage of the research were therefore combined to a series of laboratory inspired, performative approaches. This allowed for a direct reactivation of tacit knowledge on which it was then possible to attempt a more effective analysis, interpretation, and even translation into an explicit linguistic form.

Figure 7.13: Images collection for ‘Words and Things’ reenactment, Hasselt University, October 2022.

The three main performative approaches attempted have constituted immersive ethnographic research pursued through interviews, the reenactment of the ‘Words and Things’ seminar in the form of a collaborative workshop and exhibition, and the iconological analysis of recurring visual themes by means of comparative visual panels. These methodologies made it possible to respectively address three decisive aspects of the research: the multiple contexts and communities in which Kieckens was embedded, his fragmentary knowledge based on the paradigm of visual collecting, and the persistence and migration of architectural Pathosformeln within twentieth-century disciplinary culture.

The exhibition as an experimental research tool

From the beginning of 2022, on the occasion of an archival and curatorial secondment at the Flanders Architecture Institute in Antwerp, all these forms of active research found their place within the project, ‘Forêt DesCartes – Christian Kieckens and the Composite Culture of Architecture in Flanders’. The project was curated and realised in collaboration with the VAi, the University of Hasselt, and the Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture. Structured as a workshop and an exhibition, it has been a performative laboratory for addressing Kieckens’s tacit knowledge.

Figure 7.14: Filippo Cattapan, Malgorzata Maria Olchowska, and York Bing Oh, Model for the exhibition, ‘Forêt DesCartes. Christian Kieckens and the composite culture of architecture in Flanders’, Flanders Architecture Institute – De Singel Centre, Antwerp, 2022.

The first part of the project, the reenactment workshop, involved three master’s courses at the University of Hasselt, the ‘Genius Loci’ seminar held by Koenraad Van Cleempoel, and the two workshops, ‘Dewgrowth’ and ‘Plaperi’, respectively held by Eef Boeckx and Jo Berben and by Jo Janssen and Guy Cleuren, which deeply integrated the pedagogical methodology of Kieckens within their programmes. The sixty master’s students involved in the project were asked to collect a set of three images and quotes inspired by the main themes addressed in their studios and seminar. The aim was to obtain a visual but also conceptual landscape of their architectural imageries and theoretical thinking, operatively testing and tracing the related processes of selection and association (Fig. 7.13).

Figure 7.15: Filippo Cattapan, Malgorzata Maria Olchowska, and York Bing Oh, Scenography for the exhibition Forêt DesCartes – Christian Kieckens and the composite culture of architecture in Flanders, Flanders Architecture Institute – De Singel Centre, Antwerp, 2022.

The final collection of quotes and images constituted the base material for the final exhibition at the De Singel in Antwerp, whose scenography was curated and arranged together with Malgorzata Maria Olchowska and York Bing Oh. As it was for Kieckens, the exhibition was not only used as a form of communication and transmission of disciplinary knowledge, but also, and above all, as a fundamental tool for its production and understanding. The project of the exhibition was conceived as a reinterpretation of the Forêt DesCartes, scaled and inserted within the architecture of the De Singel centre, on the double ramp of Stephan Beel’s addition which goes from the offices of the VAi and the main expo-plein up to the De Singel reading room. The three pairs of images and quotes of the students — for a total of 150 pairs — were printed double-sided on thick A4 paper and suspended from fifty wooden poles distributed along the path. The red ramp constituted the board of the Forêt DesCartes, while the flags assumed the role of its postcard-holders (Fig. 7.14, 7.15). The conclusive day of the workshop, which took place at the Z33 in Hasselt, was the occasion for a wider discussion on Kieckens’s visual practices and their role within contemporary design culture in Flanders. In particular, Sofie De Caigny guided students through the ‘Composite Presence’ exhibition, and Dirk Somers gave a talk on his visual design methods based on the use of references and repertoires.

In the light of the research, the ‘Composite Presence’ exhibition appeared as the outcome of the same long-lasting disciplinary tradition identified in Rowe, Rossi, but also in Kieckens. The cultural operation attempted by Somers at the Biennale 2021 is in fact similar to the one Kieckens and Dubois tried with the ‘Architetti (della Fiandra)’ in 1991: setting a podium and superimposing to it a set of heterogeneous architectures, all coming from the same community of practice. The scenographic conception was also analogous, with a series of long wooden tables transversally positioned between the rooms (Fig. 7.16). ²⁴ The geometric difference between the two scenographies is, regardless, a meaningful aspect that should not be underestimated, and which could highlight a crucial aspect of the disciplinary positioning of Kieckens and Somers. Indeed, the scenography of the ‘Architetti (della Fiandra)’ appears to be a strictly rational and orthogonal composition, structurally based on a clear attitude towards the central perspective. On the contrary, the ‘Composite Presence’ by Somers radically embraces the compositional idea of fragmentation that is reflected in his fictional urban landscape.

Figure 7.16: Dirk Somers, Bovenbouw Architectuur, Composite Presence exhibition, Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, 2021, photo by Filip Dujardin. © Filip Dujardin.

The formal and spatial structure of the exhibitions is, then, comparable not only to the urban collage by Kollhoff, as the name explicitly suggests, but also to the ‘Kleinopenluchtmuseum’, the ‘Acropolis di Zeebrugge’, the ‘Ruimtelijke Constructie III’ and, finally, to the same Forêt DesCartes.

Key assumptions and future perspectives

Within the overall research, the operative conceptualisation of a wide set of performative activities, representations, exhibitions, and architectural projects according to the same formal and cognitive principle was a crucial step in both understanding Kieckens’s type of tacit knowledge and in identifying the appropriate boundaries of the investigation.

The reading of these practices as cultural tools within an aesthetic and social field has further laid the foundations for addressing a wide range of disciplinary migrations, the trajectories of which have substantially contributed to the construction of a cohesive European and international disciplinary discourse based on a set of shared themes.

The intersection of history and epistemology made it possible to better understand not only the figure of Kieckens, but also the overall landscape of post-war architectural theory, between the long-lasting persistence of modernism and the return to an open and synchronic past. It seems a promising research direction that still needs to be further explored.

Bibliography

• Del Giudice, Daniele. Lo Stadio di Wimbledon. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1983.
• Didi-Huberman, Georges. Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Translated by Shane Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500. Turin: Einaudi, 1976.
• Kieckens, Christian. “STOA.” Stichting Architectuurmuseum S/AM Bulletin no. 90 (1990), 10.
• Kieckens, Christian, ed. Christian Kieckens. The Place and the Building. Antwerp: Internationaal Kunstcentrum de Singel, 1997.
• Kieckens, Christian, ed. Christian Kieckens – Zoeken denken bouwen. Gent: Ludion, 2001.
• Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• Mazzucco, Katia. “1941 English Art and the Mediterranean. A Photographic Exhibition by the Warburg Institute in London.” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–28.
• Ohrt, Roberto, and Axel Heil. Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – Das Original. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2020.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders. “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol 6, 452–85. Cambridge,
• MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–35.
• Popper, Karl. Logik der Forschung. Wien: Springer, 1934.
• Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978.
• S/AM Stichting Architektuurmuseum Bullettin 3, no. 3 (1986).
• Voet, Caroline, Katrien Vandermarliere, Sofie De Caigny, and Lara Schrijver, eds. Autonomous Architecture in Flanders. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016.

1. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3.
2. ‘Leaving the shop, I am hesitant. I should continue on my way to the university, following the pertinent advice of the antiquarian bookseller, not to mention the municipal library. But it is a moment in which I feel most tempted to get lost, to wander. Perhaps there is no path, only an intermittence between probability and improbability. It is as if I would decide each move there and then, to see where it leads, and this discovery, then, was nothing more than the beginning I was looking for. I would like to maintain a certain inertia, with small pushes that are indispensable and sufficient … But how far can I get lost? And how far can I deviate?’. Daniele Del Giudice, Lo Stadio di Wimbledon (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1983), 8–9. English translation my own.
3. Christian Kieckens, “STOA,” Stichting Architectuurmuseum S/AM Bulletin no. 90 (1990), 10. English translation my own.
4. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).
5. In relation to the notion of abduction and its epistemological value within scientific method, see Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–35), 6:452–85. See also Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung (Wien: Springer, 1934).
6. In respect to the relationship between technique, language, and images, see in particular André Leroi-Gourhan, “Language Symbols,” in Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 187–219.
7. In respect to the social role of images, see in particular Leroi-Gourhan, “Introduction to a Paleontology of Symbols,” in Gesture and Speech, 269–81; Leroi-Gourhan, “The Symbols of Society,” in Gesture and Speech, 349–63.
8. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 273–74.
9. The exhibition included works by Luc Deleu & T.O.P. – Office; A.W.G. – bOb Van Reeth; Stéphane Beel; Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem; Eugeen Liebaut; Marie José Van Hee; Henk De Smet and Paul Vermeulen; Xaveer De Geyter, Giedo Driesen, Jan Meersman, Jan Thomaes; and a final epilogue by Kieckens himself, who presented his competition proposal, ‘Le ali del leone’.
10. Raymond Balau, “Interferences,” in Christian Kieckens: The Place and the Building, ed. Christian Kieckens (Antwerp: Internationaal Kunstcentrum de Singel, 1997), 111–29.
11. See Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – Das Original (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2020).
12. Kieckens designed the layout for the exhibition, ‘Fables du lieu’, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing in 2001.
13. See, in particular, Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science.
14. The open studio took place in the academic year 2015–2016. A draft collection of the students’ works, never published, is conserved at the Kieckens Kabinet at the Flemish Architecture Institute VAi. For the notion of Musée Imaginaire, see André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: Le Musée Imaginaire (Geneva: Skira, 1947).
15. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
16. Ibid., 67–71.
17. Stichting Architektuurmuseum S/AM Bullettin 3, no. 3 (1986).
18. The discovery of the plan’s photocopy in Kieckens’s archive shows his key role in such a decision. In the photocopy, the early-twentieth century survey of the Villa Adriana by the Rome school of Engineers is significantly associated with Giovanni Battista De Rossi’s 1538 plan of the city, one of the urban depictions in which the fragmented nature of the city is rendered more evidently.
19. Together with Kieckens, Marc Dubois, Marie-José Van Hee, Paul Robbrecht, and Hilde Daem are part of ‘generation 74’, so called because they all graduated from the Sint Lucas School of Architecture in Gent in 1974. See Caroline Voet et al., eds., Autonomous Architecture in Flanders (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016).
20. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978).
21. Christian Kieckens, ed., Christian Kieckens – Zoeken denken bouwen (Gent: Ludion, 2001).
22. See Katia Mazzucco, “1941 English Art and the Mediterranean: A Photographic Exhibition by the Warburg Institute in London,” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–28.
23. In relation to the possible correspondence between visual practices and architectural outcomes, i.e., between the composition of the images and the composition of spaces, the panel, ‘The Italianised Architecture of Inigo Jones and his School’, shows a peculiar affinity between the pattern of the images’ arrangement, much more symmetrical and central than the one adopted by Warburg for his Mnemosyne Atlas, and the planimetric layout of the Palladian villas which are presented.
24. The geometric difference between the two scenographies is, regardless, a meaningful aspect that should not be underestimated, and which could highlight a crucial aspect of the disciplinary positioning of Kieckens and Somers. Indeed, the scenography of the ‘Architetti (della Fiandra)’ appears to be a strictly rational and orthogonal composition, structurally based on a clear attitude towards the central perspective. On the contrary, the ‘Composite Presence’ by Somers radically embraces the compositional idea of fragmentation that is reflected in his fictional urban landscape.