On 20 September 2024, arts centre Bozar hosted “Bartók in Space and Time,” a concert in which Robbrecht en Daem architecten mirrored the music of Béla Bartók in space. Conductor Gábor Káli and Symfonieorkest Vlaanderen performed Bartók's “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” (1937), while that composition also showed itself spatially in five objects floating above the audience and orchestra. For this, Robbrecht en Daem went to... Read more

The project Huis aan de Kade - which is part of the larger urban development project Nieuw Zuid - is a U-shaped residential building along the Scheldt. The building block is flanked by an ample amount of greenery: in addition to the public inner garden, the project also has winter and roof gardens. The rather massive façade on the one hand and the light walls of the winter gardens on the other interact to create an overall balanced appearance.&... Read more

For the established clothing brand Carhartt WIP, Robbrecht en Daem renovated an existing building into a new location in Antwerp. The building was given a new plinth and the windows in the front facade were extended to the plinth so that the building can be fully read as a shop. At the same time, opening up the windows allows more light into the shop and the studio, which was appropriate given the depth of the plot.Inside, the monumental value of... Read more

After an earlier intervention in the artist's studio and scenographies for his work in Initiatief 86, Documenta IX and De Dingen Die Ik Zie, Robbrecht en Daem architecten were also responsible for the scenography of the middle space of Raoul De Keyser's first posthumous retrospective. This central room became a kaleidoscopic space, a pentagonal form with different sides.... Read more

With the Bozar Café, Robbrecht en Daem architecten aimed to create a world in all modesty, a kind of microcosm or universe. To give the visitor an experience. A returning aspect in the interiors of the café, the book shop and the box office are the 'circles' - like the form of chandeliers and mirrors - that generate a 'kind of planetarium with sunsets and sunrises'. The choice of materials, such as the dark green granite and leather benches,... Read more

The foldable ‘Ta Tisch Table’ was originally designed for the architects’ travelling exhibition Pacing through Architecture (2012). Made for laying out the drawings, sketches and photographs of their projects, these pieces were constructed in birch plywood measuring 112cm by 303cm, resting on two elegant legs in the same material, which can be folded flat on hinges under the desk. The furniture touches the floor on two linear surfaces; the... Read more

In the new clubhouse for the Winge Golf and Country Club, the relationship between inside and outside is crucial, as is the merging of the functional and the scenic. The white building envelops the entire environment, like a warm white blanket over the gently sloping terrain. Two separate building volumes are connected by a continuously sloping concrete roof, accommodating all practical functions such as tee-off and practice rooms on the one hand... Read more

Mobile radio studio that was designed for the radio programme Pompidou and set up in various places in Brussels during the Klara Festival of 2014. The studio consists of four triptychs, a table and a projection standard. Due to the flexibility of the screens, the intimacy of the space and the program is determined. The design is supposed to stimulate a conversation that happens between a few people but can be heard by thousands who do not know... Read more

The volume for the State Archives, located in the city center, is meticulously matched to the scale of the surrounding buildings. The sturdy corner building respects the pattern of the street onto which it fronts, while the long horizontal volume behind adheres to the cornice height of the surrounding streets and alleys. At the end of the horizontal wing, the facade is set back from the plot boundary. This makes space available for a small public... Read more

‘Route N16 – Public Places for Private Experience’ is an exhibition and a pragmatic study that explores the limits and potentialities of public space along the N16. The regional N16 road crosses what we can safely call the heart of the Flemish urban sprawl. Four communes, Bornem, Puurs, Willebroek and Mechelen, all located in the province of Antwerp, are connected by the N16. This road winds through an area that is almost exemplary for... Read more

In the summer of 2013 Robbrecht en Daem architecten realizes a temporary pavilion based on a competition design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930. The design, a clubhouse for a golf course in the gently rolling countryside around the former industrial city of Krefeld, Germany, was never built at the time it was designed. Christiane Lange, art historian and curator for ProjektMIK, invited Robbrecht en Daem architecten to design an objet d'... Read more

Ann Demeulemeester’s flagship store is in a corner building on Leopold De Waelplaats in Antwerp – the square to which the fashion designer contributed with a circular bench. The building is part of a prestigious row of houses and looks like an upper-middle-class house, but was designed and is used as a workshop. During the redesign, the ground floor was cleared, although the workplace character was preserved: the rough wooden floors, the iron... Read more

Raoul De Keyser’s oeuvre is permeated by an original, internal and inherently spatial constellation. De Keyser’s paintings do not fit within the Renaissance idiom of a window upon an illusory perspective. The paintings shift, glide, oscillate, overlap and, at times, they also fall. Even when they do in fact suggest an architectonic space, a cabinet for example, there is a certain spatial friction. It is precisely this extremely controlled... Read more

The Greenwich café is an iconic Grand Café in the centre of Brussels. Following discussions with the Royal Commission of Monuments and Landscapes of the District of Brussels, a Building Permit was obtained for the restoration of this listed building which was placed on the List of Buildings of Remarkable Architectural Heritage in 2000.The ground floor façade, the stained glass cupola above the Winter Garden, and the remarkable interiors of the... Read more

The shopping centre at Sint-Janspoort is a more sustainable counterpart to the large shopping centres on the outskirts of towns and cities and covers a whole block in the historical city centre of Kortrijk. With its interiorised street pattern and monumental atrium – the garden of light – this shopping centre forms a diagonal link between Steenpoort and Veemarkt. The tower closes off one end of the Romeinselaan. The volumetry of the block,... Read more

Refurbishment of the entrance hall and auditorium in the Royal Museum for Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA). This included the reception desk, benches, signalisation in the entrance hall, lectern, speaker’s desk and the separation wall in the auditorium.... Read more

Robbrecht en Daem was commissioned by Christiane Lange to design the exhibition of the furnishings and interior spaces that Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich had designed for Haus Lange, a building designed by Mies van der Rohe himself. The exhibition was held in the place where only recently this furniture was used on a daily basis. The house has since been converted into a museum and the architecture of Mies van der Rohe has become an object on... Read more

The ‘Ligeti bench’, which was designed for the foyers of the Concert Hall in Bruges (1999– 2002), ranks as one of the most empathically coloured designs of Robbrecht en Daem. This piece derived from the idea of introducing lightness as a contrast to the rigid concrete interiors of the building. A low, deep bench was designed and painted in stripes, with a colour composition inspired by the precisely conceived Farbenklavier of Le Corbusier.... Read more

A wooden walkway, which descends from a platform to the small valley behind a villa in southern Flanders, leads to the Woodland Cabin, a distant relative of the igloo and the small buildings one comes across in the mountains everywhere in the world. On a platform next to a pond, wooden blocks have been stacked to form a two-lobed space that is closed off with a glass wall and door. Beams that fan out support a green roof from which emerges the... Read more

Scenography of an exhibition in BOZAR Brussels on Flemish Artists in Rome during the Renaissance... Read more

This desk was made as a birthday present in 1992 for the artist Gerhard Richter and was conceived with the idea of creating space in which for him to contemplate. Built out of cherry-wood with a linoleum desktop, the piece displays an elegant simplicity. Its trapezium, horizontal surface tilts slightly from the longer upper side towards the shorter front. Like old school desks the small table has storage under the horizontal surface, which... Read more

Together with the work of Cristina Iglesias, René Daniëls and Philippe Van Snick, Isa Genzken’s sculptures form a basic component of the double exhibition Floor for a Sculpture, Wall for a Painting which was once described as Robbrecht en Daem’s ‘materialized manifesto’. In the gallery, two sturdy cavity walls were added to the existing architecture, as a resultof which a new corner was created. In one of the exhibitions, Van Snick... Read more