Double Up or In Unison. Encounters of Art and Architecture in the Work of Robbrecht en Daem architecten

By Wouter Davidts
Pleasure in Making (2016) by Valérie Mannaerts is the latest outcome of three decades of collaborations between the architects Robbrecht and Daem and contemporary artists. The artwork was made for Victor, a café in the Brussels arts centre BOZAR (Centre for Fine Arts) that was recently refurbished by the architects and named after Horta, the architect of the renowned Palais des Beaux Arts. Upon the invitation of Robbrecht en Daem, Mannaerts created a curtain piece that, when drawn, closes off a private space at the rear of the café. Pleasure in Making consists of three wall-sized, hand-embroidered curtains, for which Mannaerts transferred small drawings in pencil on paper onto the fabric with vividly coloured wool threads. Hand-stitched and woven, Pleasure in Making subtly plays with the objecthood of drawing on the one hand and the drawing-like capacity of objects on the other, one of the central preoccupations of Mannaerts’s work.2 On each curtain a jagged, uneven rectangular shape – a drawn perspective of a folding screen – serves as the ground upon which the artist laid out the respective laced drawings. The exterior sides of the curtains that veil the private room from the public area of the café received a sensual motif of an element that reads as both flower and orifice. The interior sides, however, display a distinctly figurative arrangement, ranging from an interior setup dominated by a table, to a vase with flowers and a pair of black legs, as well as a waving figure and distinct body parts such as feet and hands.

Robbrecht en Daem’s invitation to Mannaerts was unambiguous. They did not ask her to ‘do something’ in the café. They specifically requested that she make a curtain for the rear area. When the architects were commissioned to design a café in BOZAR, they recalled with great admiration the set of curtains Mannaerts had installed in the Horta building three years before.3 For her solo exhibition Orlando in the antechambres of BOZAR, situated in the upper part of the building close to the entrance at the side of the Royal Palace, she created a body of work that responded directly to the unique material and spatial disposition of the delicately designed galleries clustered around a domed hall. In addition to new sculptures, collages and drawings, the artist also made three curtains out of unprepared brown canvas, onto which geometric patterns and figures in coloured thread were loosely knit.4 One mural-sized curtain, adorned with triangular shapes and diagonal receding lines, closed off a passage way in the circular space at the centre, while two symmetrical curtains, garlanded with two diagonally crossing patterns of red and brown thread, veiled two defunct doorways in one of the gallery spaces.

The curtains Mannaerts made for café Victor, however, differ significantly from the ones made for the exhibition Orlando. The artist replaced the geometric configurations with figurative elements. Flowers, floral and vegetal motifs, body parts and fragments, as well as household items and pieces of furniture now populate the fabric. She exchanged the abstract language of form and pattern for a narrative and associative language of objects and symbols, resulting in drawn still lifes of an undeniably domestic and erogenous nature. When the curtains close off the rear of the café, they generate a sensuous room, an erotic cabinet of sorts. As Mannaerts realised that her work had to stand up to a rather luxurious interior design replete with stylish furniture, not unlike a Viennese café, she aimed to create a work that ‘would make a difference in and of itself’. Rather than ‘opting for a reduction of presence’, she decided to ‘sanction it all the more’. When asked why she refuted the abstract geometry of the earlier curtains, she most tellingly responded that this would have been ‘double up’.5

Compulsory collaborations

Over the course of the past three decades Robbrecht en Daem have worked together with more than a dozen artists, and with some of them on more than one occasion. Apart from artists from younger generations, like Mannaerts, Dirk Braeckman, and Michaël Borremans, the architects have also engaged in collaborative projects with such now-prominent artists as Raoul De Keyser, Isa Genzken, Rodney Graham, Cristina Iglesias, Juan Muñoz, Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, Benoît Van Innis, Franz West and Rachel Whiteread. The projects are as diverse in terms of programme as they are different in terms of scale. Artists were called upon to work on projects of domestic, administrative, social, cultural and urban nature, that is, on such buildings as a house, an office, an art gallery, an art institution, a restaurant, a concert hall, an urban foyer, even a city square. What binds them is the fact that the architects started all of the collaborations upon their own initiative. Robbrecht en Daem never needed the One Percent Rule6 to have artists enter into a dialogue with their building designs. Based on their personal knowledge and appreciation of an artist’s work and practice they invited that artist to join in on a project, yet always with a ‘clear expectation about the location and scale of the work’.7 Paul Robbrecht has confirmed on many occasions that the decision to involve an artist and to make art present in their architecture always grew ‘out of necessity’.8

The self-imposed partnership with art and artists is often interpreted as the obvious outcome of the architects’ enduring attempts to explore the boundaries of their own territory.9 Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem graduated from architecture school in the late 1970s and were part of a generation of aspiring architects that critically tested the limits of their own discipline, that is, the relative autonomy of architecture.10 The definition of the terrain proper to architecture, Robbrecht indicated in an interview in 1997, was a key preliminary exercise: ‘This self-reflection was necessary before a dialogue could be established with other means of expression. It led to a definition of architecture in terms of its autonomous presence, which is what ultimately grants the discipline its public legitimacy.’11

Very few architects of their generation, however, turned to art for a dialogue. At the time of their graduation the terrain favoured by architects to explore the differential specificity of architecture was philosophy, as well as language and literature theory.12 When Robbrecht en Daem started to collaborate with artists in the mid-1980s, the relationship between artists and architects was outright adversarial. The general climate was rife with reciprocal prejudices and suspicions between the disciplines of art and architecture and its respective practitioners.13 Robbrecht en Daem’s personal determination to turn to art and artists was therefore not self-evident. To fully understand the merits of the collaborative projects between Robbrecht en Daem and artists, it is necessary to ask why the former turned to the latter in the first place. Why art? And even more crudely: why art necessarily?
“I remember reading in some book now long forgotten that the most memorable places do not refer back to themselves, nor do they represent anything outside themselves, but they are seeking an encounter with some other individualentity” ¹
Juan Muñoz

Memorable encounters

Since childhood, art has been a key influence and source of inspiration for both Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem.14 Yet when they started out as architects two elements were of key importance: Robbrecht’s teaching position in an art academy at a very early stage on the one hand, and their shared encounters with artists on the other. Talking about architecture to young art students, film-makers and photographers, Robbrecht admitted, turned out to be a beneficial exercise. It allowed him to define the differential specificity of both disciplines: ‘I loved to point out the differences – what it is that makes architecture different from art. I wanted to focus the discussion, taking negation as the starting point.’15

In an essay on Robbrecht en Daem’s contribution to a closed competition for a pier in 1985 in Zeeland, the Netherlands , Robbrecht indeed adopts a rather adverse stance. ‘Art’, he rebukes, ‘is focused so much on the originality of a subject, on a limited problematic, on the unique and deviant as well, that I experience this stance as a significant loss of art’s value.’ The great value of the discipline of architecture though, he continues, is that it cannot assume such a dissentious position at all: “Architecture on the contrary is always immediately confronted with the totality; it cannot evade the totality of human existence, even if it is dealing with self-evident, simple commissions, such as the design of a tram stop. I cannot imagine that architecture can take on a negative posture towards reality. It is inherent to the discipline that architecture cannot be arbitrary, that it cannot elude.”16

A set of key encounters with artists of their own generation would soon change Robbrecht’s view. In 1986 he and Hilde Daem participated in Chambres d’Amis, the large-scale exhibition organised in the summer of that year by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent under the leadership of director Jan Hoet. Artists from different generations had been invited to conceive a work of art for domestic spaces and environments, put at their disposal by 72 private citizens of Ghent. Robbrecht and Daem opened up their house to the French artist Niele Toroni, who put his characteristic painterly marks in the guest room on the first floor, streetside. For the young architects Chambres d’Amis served as a unique and unexpectedly intense introduction to a large and international community of artists.17 They encountered Toroni, but also artists such as Iglesias and Muñoz, with whom they became close friends. It was nothing less than ‘a summer of artistic love’, they jokingly recalled.18

The impact of Chambres d’Amis on Robbrecht and Daem, however, went much further than the intense social encounters and exchange. The exhibition served, as Iwona Blazwick has rightfully pointed out, as nothing less than their ‘introduction to the potential of visual arts in the context of architecture’.19 The presence of the art exhibition in the city of Ghent in general, and the painterly intervention of Niele Toroni in their own house in particular granted them a unique understanding of architecture via art. Some of the works in the exhibition Chambres d’Amis allowed them to understand why the presence of art in architecture sometimes appeared a necessity. 

Two generations

Chambres d’Amis brought together two different generations of artists that were active in the mid-1980s. While it included by then already canonical artists like Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz and Lawrence Weiner, key protagonists of minimalism, conceptual art and arte povera, it also gave rooms to a generation of artists that had emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Gunther Förg, Niek Kemps, Muñoz, Rob Scholte and Jan Vercruysse.20 These younger artists revolted against the cerebral nature of the work of their peers on the one hand, and the self-directed ilk of the discourse of institutional critique on the other, both of which they experienced as a straightforward deadlock. They gently broke with the absolute ban on figuration and narration that had haunted art since the advent of minimalism in the early 1960s. Instead they resorted to materiality and craft, human scale and reference, and objects and figures of the everyday. Artists in the 1980s collectively returned to a pre-conceptualist notion of art and allowed an artwork to be once again a material, well-made and poetical expression.21

The difference between these two aforementioned generations became plainly apparent in the works realised for Chambres d’Amis. Whereas Buren’s Le Décor et son Double primarily targeted the exhibition’s rhetoric about the collective flight from the space of the museum, Muñoz bestowed a house with a poetic addition of architectural nature. Buren returned to the museum and built an exact replica of the guest room in the house of the collectors Anton and Annick Herbert within the vestibule of the Museum of Fine Arts; Muñoz stayed inside the house into which he had been welcomed and had two scaled-down balconies obliquely suspended from the ceiling of two separate rooms. While the former took aim at institutional strategies and curatorial fantasies, the latter addressed domestic stability and the relative border between private sphere and public realm. The work of Toroni, realised within Robbrecht and Daem’s home, delivered a remarkable reconciliation of both positions. Toroni belongs to the older generation of artists that participated in Chambres d’Amis and is commonly regarded as a key exponent of fundamental painting, a rigorously analytical and rational deconstruction of the medium. For his contribution to Chambres d’Amis, however, the artist made a remarkable concession. 

Improper Objects and Gestures

In a little-known yet fascinating essay of 1987, entitled ‘The Place of Art. Recommendations and Statements. Admonitions’, Robbrecht penned his recollections of Toroni’s arrival, presence and subsequent making of the painterly intervention on the walls of the guest room. Robbrecht remarks that the type of painting practised by Toroni, ‘is about the right to exist, about legitimacy’. In comparatively similar words to two years previously, he signals the key difference with architecture: "This research and the accompanying conscience – the moral act of painting (Richter) – do not rhyme with the self-scrutiny that the art of building can apply. In its totality it escapes the grip of personal choice, as there is always the necessity of satisfaction. There is no moral yes or no in architecture, there is only the moral axiom that precedes each architectural act."22

Robbrecht acknowledges the critical relationship of Toroni’s painterly work and practice towards the institutional and architectural framework within which art becomes visible. Not unlike Buren, Toroni systematically applies the same painterly motif in continuously changing architectural contexts. The paradoxical effect of this procedure, Robbrecht notes, is that it both underscores and deconstructs the uniqueness of a place: ‘space is the ever changing frame of the work’.23 As Toroni ‘dutifully followed the rules of the artistic event of Chambres d’Amis’, the architect critically perceives, the artist could no longer stick to his usual aloof stance. He was forced to abandon his habitual analytical and rational approach. ‘Despite the radical rejection of all sentiment in the work of Niele Toroni’, Robbrecht remarks, ‘one cannot escape the intimacy to be alone with an artwork that indifferently throws everything back onto yourself.’ The only escape, albeit ‘trivial’ he notes, is offered by a bottle of whisky.24

When Toroni formulated his final project for Chambres d’Amis, he not only described his painterly project in objective terms, but also stipulated that the owner offer a drink to visitors: Projet Définitif: Dans la chambre d’amis choisie seront visibles des empreintes de pinceau n°50 répétées à intervalles réguliers de 30 cm. (Saucil/peinture de Niele Toroni) et sera buvable un whisky (offert par le propriétaire).25

It is tempting to agree with Robbrecht that the inclusion of the whisky bottle in the room is merely trivial. Yet I want to argue here that this rather prosaic addition to Toroni’s rigorous painterly addition intervention had a remarkable effect, one that paradoxically enough had not escaped the architect: ‘a bottle of whiskey stands on the cupboard, so you are welcome’.26 The inclusion of such an everyday object, as a whisky bottle, must have struck many visitors at the time as unfitting, if not outright improper in a work by Toroni. Robbrecht, however, considered it as nothing less than a compromise. A vital one though. He insightfully notes that the ordinary object served to counterbalance the indifferent nature of the artwork: it was a necessary act of welcome. The presence of the bottle allowed the work to become more than a mere act of self-reflexive painting displayed within a domestic interior.

Necessary addition

One of the most important effects of Chambres d’Amis, Bart Verschaffel registered at the time, was not the realisation of the museum’s ambition to democratise the arts, but the artists’ ‘eager use of hospitality’, their unbridled acceptance of domestic space as a work and living space, as a frame of reference. ‘Art comes home where it is someone’s guest’, he most evocatively entitled his review.27 Robbrecht en Daem must have distilled a similar insight from Chambres d’Amis. The architects did not identify with the contrived curatorial ambitions of the museum and the artists’ possible critique on them, but rather with the delicate responses of some of the participating artists to the interiors in which they were invited to stay. The lesson learned by Robbrecht en Daem then was not so much the one delivered by Buren and the likes about art and institutional policy, but rather by Muñoz and his contemporaries about art and domestic space. With the latter they shared a distrust of ‘the simplification inherent in minimalism’ and the ensuing reduction of art to the sheer self-reflexive activity of conceptual art and institutional critique.28 Robbrecht and Daem must have realised that if the presence of art was requested in architecture, domestic buildings in particular, the more fundamental strands of art would not do, let alone the work of those artists that would symbolically refuse to sojourn. Most significantly Robbrecht reproduced the text piece that Lawrence Weiner contributed to Chambres d’Amis and located it in ‘all addresses’ as the coda of his own reflections on the exhibition in 1987:

Toroni’s ‘improper’ addition to his own work provided further insight: what the presence of the bottle did to Toroni’s piece, the presence of art could also do to architecture, albeit in a reversed manner. Via Toroni’s bottle Robbrecht and Daem came to understand that art could serve as an essential counterbalance to the all-too-pervasive wish of architecture to accommodate and, above all, to be accommodating; not to parry the indifference of the art, for that matter, but rather the goodwill of architecture. In and of itself architecture cannot be welcoming. Hospitable architecture is a fantasy, a mere projection of human desire and expectation onto buildings. Hospitality depends on the generosity or coarseness of the people that occupy and use it. Architecture can provide only the framework within which to welcome guests. Buildings cannot say ‘welcome’, just as they cannot say ‘get out’. Only residents can. So does art. ‘Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room’, a voice whispers in a room by Bruce Nauman.30 And ‘If you can’t take a joke you can get the fuck out of my house’, a painting by Christopher Wool addresses the viewer.31

The necessity of bringing in art and artists, Robbrecht explained to Chris Dercon in an interview in 2012, stems from the recognition that ‘there are moments when the architecture by and through itself is simply not enough.’32 This comprehension, however, is not necessarily as negatively informed as it sounds at first. From the start of its practice Robbrecht en Daem departed from ‘the paradigm of speechlessness of architecture, architecture as the preeminent medium of not-saying’. Architecture, Robbrecht has asserted time and again, ‘is not in fact a form of expression’.33 It is impossible, if not inappropriate, to try to express the emotional life-world of the architect in a building design.34 ‘In architecture you don’t express feelings such as unhappiness’, he succinctly put it, ‘just as little as happiness by the way’.35 Nevertheless, Robbrecht acknowledges that the making of architecture is permeated by tales and narratives, but it does not fall within architecture’s aptitude to express them: ‘(architectural) space may be charged with all sorts of preoccupations – our architecture also involves stories – but essentially it displays architecture and nothing else.’35 The awareness of this incapacity of architecture, however, has not freed Robbrecht from his desire for it to be able to do so anyhow. Unlike Ludwig Wittgenstein, who left architecture for philosophy because the first house he designed and built lacked the capacity to give expression to deep emotions and feelings, Robbrecht stayed with his discipline.37 He and Hilde Daem befriended artists instead. They welcomed artists in their work to mediate their conviction that architecture is not capable of expression at all.

From the beginning art served, as Robbrecht clarified to Dercon, as a critical presence that equipoises the benevolent nature of architecture: ‘It is like the presence of a counter world that challenges the architecture and completes it at the same time.’ The inevitable task of architecture to accommodate life, to provide ‘commoditas’, prevents it from being dissentious: ‘[...] architecture must always be good, but art can manifestly express strangeness, evil even. Architecture cannot do that. [...] The ugly, the objectionable is an important theme in culture, yet it is something that architecture cannot express. Then suddenly art plays an important role.’ Given his determination to remain ‘an architect who builds’, Robbrecht saw himself deprived of ‘the option of being negative’, let alone of leaving the profession.38 However, with artists he claimed he encountered ‘the possibility of being negative [...], the option of creating negative worlds’.39 When leafing through the portfolio of their collaborations with artists, it is hard to regard the artists’ contributions to the respective architecture projects as mainly antagonistic or dissentious. Few artists, if any at all, bedecked a building by Robbrecht en Daem with a truly negative, unpleasant or uncanny artwork, let alone an offensive one. ‘[N]egation, resistance, and violence’, strategies privileged for art by Robbrecht, do not immediately mark the artworks that enrich their building designs. Imagination, generosity and gentleness are far more applicable. The artworks do not claim to remedy the shortcomings of the buildings; nor do they pedantically point them out. The art rather grabs the opportunity to add a layer to a building project that simply falls outside the faculties of architecture: to generate images, and even more so, to trigger stories. 
My House is your house mi casa es su casa su casa es mi casa your house is my house if you shit on the floor it gets on your feet ²⁹

Not on Display

Leading towards the center (1988), by Juan Muñoz, is an enigmatic handrail running into a brick wall in the glass house at the rear of the Mys House (1983–1993), generally considered Robbrecht en Daem’s first mature design project.40 One inevitably wonders whether the railing is the relic of a former part of the building, a remaining fragment of a staircase that disappeared during the extensive refurbishment of the house. In absence of any stairs, the banister does not assist residents or visitors upwards; it rather points them towards the garden. A useless piece of architecture at first, it then emerges as a beautiful token of guidance and direction. Thierry Decordier engraved a sentence onto the window of the loggia (Parfois j’aimerais que mes cheveux soient si longs; qu’à traîner par terre, je puisse, tout simplement en me promenant, balayer le monde...!, 11.4.1988). Looking outside, one ponders who is being addressed here by this melancholic reflection, this forlorn reverie.

Camera (1990) by Isa Genzken consists of an over-scaled steel window frame positioned on the roof terrace of the Apartment Greta Meert in Brussels. Defying balance and gravity, it leans dangerously over the railing of the terrace and looms over the pedestrians on the street. Camera mediates between the city and the two-storey penthouse on top of the art nouveau warehouse. Viewed from the balcony of the glass box on top of the penthouse, which serves as the guesthouse for the artists of the art gallery run by the owner of the building on the floors below, Camera poetically frames a nondescript section of the urban hotchpotch of the European capital.41 Throughout their oeuvre Robbrecht en Daem have systematically emancipated architectural elements such as porticoes, apertures and load-bearing structures. These elements-made-sovereign stress the architectural order and exemplify the architects’ continuous exploration of the limits of the autonomy of architecture.42 Camera does not serve this idiosyncratic design method of Robbrecht en Daem. It gives material and visual expression to the metaphor of an artistic outpost, while it also provides a captivating metaphor for the work of the artist – relentlessly framing and reframing our daily reality. The views offered, Camera invariably suggests, are unstable, continuously changing and arbitrary. Yet the artwork would not be able to perform its magic without the delicately designed architecture that supports and surrounds it. Camera’s captivating juggle with viewpoint and hazard depends on it. Moreover, the boundaries between the artwork by Genzken and the architectural project by Robbrecht en Daem are indistinct, almost non-existent. Nothing articulates the transition from sculpture to building. Camera’s steel window frame gently rests on the terrace tiles. The artwork subtly blends with its architectural context, while the building as a whole generously acts as a socle. Together, sculpture and building generate a captivating story about the potential rapport between art, artists, architecture and the city.

The distinction between artwork and architecture is even harder to define in the cupolas devised by Cristina Iglesias for the Katoen Natie in Antwerp (Untitled, 2001). Made of steel and the luminous material of alabaster, the eight polygon-shaped ceiling lights almost ‘seamlessly’ merge with the structure of the reconverted warehouse.43 Even though the cupolas are striking presences within the building, they are barely visible as such. Or phrased differently, they are not ‘exposed’ in a traditional sense. The almost-otherworldly appearance of the artwork produces a critical confrontation with the rudimentary nature of the surrounding architecture, yet paradoxically enough without overstressing the difference. This would have been inappropriate in the space that the cupolas illuminate. Robbrecht en Daem did not invite the artist to provide lighting elements for the ceremonial spaces of the shipping company’s headquarters – those are situated on the same floor, but without artistic intervention – but for rather mundane office spaces. It is hard to tell what the artwork by Iglesias does in these administrative areas. Undoubtedly the employees no longer notice it during their daily routine, even less acknowledge its status as an artwork. But this might be precisely the perverse beauty of these mesmerising, mineral window towers. More than any expensive or chic interior finishing, Iglesias’s cupolas convey that every single living and working space merits more than the proverbial office art. As Robbrecht noted in 1987: ‘Subversion takes effect by way of elegance.’44

When Tree of Life by Rachel Whiteread was unveiled in 2002 on the upper left façade of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, it filled a remarkable blank. The original plans for the façade of the old building (1901), designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, included a frieze embodying the gallery’s public message – bringing great art to the people of London. The frieze, designed by Walter Crane in 1899, was never realised and a large black rectangle had instead remained above the main entrance since that time. In their first submission to the closed design competition, Robbrecht en Daem marked the space as ‘the blank canvas’, in other words as a potential place for an artwork.45 In dialogue with the Whitechapel Gallery director, Iwona Blazwick, the commission went to Rachel Whiteread, an artist who lives and works in the area. Taking inspiration from the ‘Tree of Life’, an Arts and Crafts motif adorning the gallery’s towers, and ‘Hackney weed’, an urban plant that grows on buildings in the area, Whiteread covered the gallery’s façade with shimmering foliage.46 Clusters of leaves, cast in bronze and plated in gold leaf, clamber their way up the façade. Four reliefs, casts of the windows situated in the lower part of the façade, stand as reminders of previous architectural interventions. Representing both spring and autumn, Tree of life hints at the inevitable processes of beginning and end, of formation and demise, that mark the cycles of human life. Yet Whiteread’s Tree of Life does not impose this narrative upon the façade. The artwork subtly blends with the existing decorative scheme of the building. It seems to spring from the original surface. Made for the façade of an art gallery, the work is paradoxically enough not on display. Many of the gallery-goers probably never notice it. As subtle as the addition may be, it definitely does animate the building. 

In Unison

Robbrecht has indicated repeatedly that he adheres to the belief that an artwork needs to find a place. In a letter to Geert Bekaert, dated 14 November 1988, the architect voices his critique on the general tendency in museums to move artworks around continuously. To avoid those artworks seeming to ‘wander as ghosts’ in museum buildings, they deserve a fixed place: ‘I cherish the romantic idea that an artwork, if it is a good artwork, has to find its place, even has the destiny to find its place. This doesn’t differ for a contemporary or a classical artwork. One visits that place because the artwork is there.’47 Later on, Robbrecht designates this place as ‘unforgettable’.48 In many ways this remains a rather puzzling statement. It is surprising that architects who matured in the era of postmodernism fall back on a pre-modern idea: architecture, as it were, needs to take on the role of Mother of the Arts, as if the loss of place and destination that art suffered in modernity could be remedied once again. This opinion, however, as Bart Cassiman has argued, is first and foremost the result of Robbrecht en Daem’s profound appreciation of art: a good artwork is not served by being exposed to a nomadic existence.49 It deserves a place where it can alight. Whereas art benefits from the benevolent support of architecture to become present and visible, architecture profits from the critical presence of art to become loquacious. Maybe it should not come as a surprise then that this remarkable rapport between artwork and building, which has come to mark the collaborative projects of Robbrecht en Daem, manifests itself the most in buildings with non-art-related programmes.50 In these projects art is not exposed. Integration on the other hand is a term that does not apply either. The art is not in display in the architecture; both are in unison with each other. The architects always aim to ‘create encounters with works of art’, resulting in what they tend to define as an ‘elegant cohabitation’.51 Art comes home where it is architecture’s guest.

Pleasure in Making by Valérie Mannaerts, the artwork with which this chapter started, is the most recent exemplar of this beneficial strategy. Wildly different from the architectural project that hosts it, Mannaerts’s curtains are nevertheless delicately subsumed by it. The boisterous drawings that adorn the fabric appeal to senses and sensitivities that are hard to address in building design. While the artwork grants the architecture an extravagance it can hardly attain by itself, the building provides the art with a context it can rarely procure for itself. For Robbrecht en Daem the relationship between art and architecture, or between artists and architects for that matter, has never been one of adversarial competition nor of lofty symbiosis. Rather than double up architecture with art, or vice versa, they strive to productively join forces. Together, they can express much more. 
Notes
1 Juan Muñoz, ‘My Dear Friend’, in Steven Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), pp. 138–9 (138).
2 In an interview with Ann Demeester, Mannaerts explains that this preoccupation stems from the ‘fascination that I time and time again seem to have for the powerful zone between two- and three-dimensionality’. See ‘Entre Nous: a Hop, Skip and Jump Conversation: Valérie Mannaerts in Conversation with Ann Demeester’, in Valérie Mannaerts: An Exhibition Another Exhibition, exh. cat., Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp/De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Antwerp and Berlin, 2011), pp. 57–71 (62).
3 In 2013 Valérie Mannaerts and Robbrecht en Daem also collaborated on an exhibition project along a national highway between Antwerp and Brussels, entitled N16 – Public Spaces for Private Experience. On a grassy vacant plot of land alongside the road the architects delineated a playground with cables, within which the artist positioned a set of colourful, vertical sculptures.
4 Valérie Mannaerts made her first large-scale curtain for the exhibition Blood Flow in 2010, in Extra City in Antwerp, where it cut off a large section of the back part of the exhibition space.
5 Valérie Mannaerts in conversation with the author, studio of the artist, Schaarbeek, Brussels, Thursday 24 June 2016.
6 The legal basis for the ‘1% rule’ regarding art in public buildings derives from the Decree on the Integration of ArtWorks (1986).The decree provides that 1% of the budgetfor new builds or the construction of government buildings, or buildings subsidized by the government, must be put towards the realization of an art work.
7 Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem in conversation with the author, Robbrecht en Daem offices, Ghent, Tuesday 21 June 2016. It is important to mention that the architects stressed in our conversation that they have never thought that every building ‘needs art’. Birgit Cleppe rightfully points out in this regard that Robbrecht and Daem have always related to art ‘with trepidation’. See Birgit Cleppe, ‘“Torn between Two Loves”: Tentative Encounters between Art and Architecture by Christian Kieckens, Robbrecht en Daem architecten and Marie-José Van Hee’, in Caroline Voet, Katrien Vandermarliere, Sofie De Caigny and Lara Schrijver, eds, Autonomous Architecture in Flanders: The Early Works of Marie-José Van Hee, Christian Kieckens, Marc Dubois, Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem (Leuven, 2016), pp. 62–75 (63).
8 Paul Robbrecht, Stefan Devoldere and Iwan Strauven, ‘A Conversation at the Home of Jean Prouvé’, in Stefan Devoldere, Maarten Delbeke and Iwan Strauven, Robbrecht en Daem: Pacing through Architecture, exh. cat., BOZAR(Brussels and Cologne, 2009), pp. 3–9 (4).
9 Geert Bekaert, Hedendaagsearchitectuur in België (Tielt, 1995), p. 180 (my translation).
10 Steven Jacobs starts his essay for the first monograph of the work of Robbrecht en Daem with the following sentence: ‘The whole oeuvre of Paul Robbrecht and Daem is an attempt to explore the limits of the autonomy of architecture.’ See Steven Jacobs, ‘Unforgettable Places’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), pp. 6–60 (7). In a recent publication devoted to the 1980s’ generation of architects in Flanders,  Caroline Voet, Katrien Vandermarliere, Sofie De Caigny and Lara Schrijver, eds, Autonomous Architecture in Flanders: The Early Works of Marie-José Van Hee, Christian Kieckens, Marc Dubois, Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem(Leuven, 2016), Robbrecht en Daem acts as a key protagonist.
11 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘A Conversation, November 1997. Farshid Moussavi and Paul Robbrecht’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture:Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), pp. 145–54 (146).
12 ‘Not long ago’, Hal Foster quipped, ‘a near pre-requisite for vanguard architecture was an engagement with theory; lately it has become an acquaintance with art.’ See Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York, 2011), p. viii.
13 In 1987 Robbrecht en Daem had its fair share of battles with artists. Invited by Chris Dercon to design the scenography for the exhibition project Theatergarden Bestiarium, the cooperation between the artists and the architects became very difficult. In his account of the process, Dercon indicates that a meeting in Münster with all the participants turned into a clichéd exchange of suspicions: ‘A design submitted by Daem and Robbrecht was discussed; some artists feared their scheme for the table and bleachers would make for an exhibition that was “overly designed,” and too expensive. Daem and Robbrecht reacted with disappointment and stressed that their design was meant more as a selfless support for the artists’ works than as an autonomous contribution that would represent “architecture.” They questioned whether the participants were capable of reading architectural schemes.’ See Chris Dercon, ‘Many Dreams of Many Gardens’, in Chris Dercon, ed., Theatergarden Bestiarium: The Garden As Theater as Museum (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990), pp. 14–29 (22).
14 Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem in conversation with the author, Robbrecht en Daem offices, Ghent, Tuesday 21 June 2016.
15 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘A Conversation, November 1997. Farshid Moussavi and Paul Robbrecht’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture:Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), p. 146.
16 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘Een Onvergetelijke Plaats: Paul Robbrecht, Wim Cuyvers, Hilde Daem and Christiaen Kieckens’, in Anton Van Gemert and Ruud Brouwers, eds., Architectuur voor een Zee-Land (Rotterdam, 1985), pp. 46–8 (47): ‘De kunst richt zich zo sterk op de originaliteit van een onderwerp, op een beperkte problematiek, het eenmalige en het afwijkende ook, dat ik er een groot verlies aan de waarde van de kunst in zie. Architectuur daarentegen is altijd onmiddellijk geplaatst tegenover de totaliteit, kan deze totaliteit van het menselijk bestaan niet ontwijken, zelfs als het gaat om heel vanzelfsprekende, eenvoudige opgaven, zoals bijvoorbeeld het maken van een tramhalte. Ik kan mij niet voorstellen dat de architectuur een negatieve houding ten aanzien van de werkelijkheid aanneemt. Het is inherent aan de disciplone dat architectuur niet vrijblijvend is, niet ontwijkt.’ The essay was published in the catalogue of an exhibition documenting an architecture competition for a new pier in Zeeland, the Netherlands. The results of the competition were exhibited in the hemicycle of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent from 5 April to 4 May 1986 and also included projects by Luc Deleu, John Körmeling, Benthem Crouwel, Frank and Paul Wintermans, and Wim Cuyvers.
17 In addition to hosting an artist in their house, Robbrecht and Daem also gained greater visibility during the summer of 1986 for their remarkable design for the exhibition of René Heyvaert in the St Peter’s Abbey in Ghent.
18 Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem in conversation with the author, Robbrecht en Daem offices, Ghent, Tuesday 21 June 2016.
19 Iwona Blazwick, ‘A Work of Art Enters the Room’, 2G, Revista Internacional de Arquitectura 55 (III) (2010), pp. 14–23 (15).
20 It should be mentioned here that Robbrecht and Daem were already familiar with the work of many of these artists of both generations, who they had encountered from 1979 onwards at Het Gewad in Ghent, an avant-garde centre for contemporary art founded by Jan Debbaut (then curator of the Van Abbemuseum in Einhoven), Anton Herbert (collector) and Joost De Clercq (gallerist). When the centre closed its doors in 1992, it had exhibited work of an impressive group of artists, many of whom also participated in Chambres d’Amis: Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Dan Graham, Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt, Guiseppe Penone, Gilbert & George, Rebecca Horn, Jan Vercruysse, Thomas Schütte, Jef Geys, René Daniëls, Cindy Sherman, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Gerhard Merz, Lili Dujouri, Juan Muñoz, Cristina Iglesias, Ettore Spaletti, François Hers, Niek Kemps and Tony Cragg. See Birgit Cleppe, ‘“Torn between Two Loves”: Tentative Encounters between Art and Architecture by Christian Kieckens, Robbrecht en Daem architecten and Marie-José Van Hee’, in Caroline Voet, Katrien Vandermarliere, Sofie De Caigny and Lara Schrijver, eds, Autonomous Architecture in Flanders: The Early Works of Marie-José Van Hee, Christian Kieckens, Marc Dubois, Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem(Leuven, 2016),  pp. 66–7.
21 Iwona Blazwick, ‘A Work of Art Enters the Room’, 2G, Revista Internacional de Arquitectura 55 (III) (2010), p. 15; Maarten Liefooghe and StefaanVervoort, ‘Een revelerendgesprek: de figuren van Thomas Schütte in Het Huis van Robbrecht & Daem’, De Witte Raaf 158 (July–August 2012), pp. 8-9.
22 Paul Robbrecht, ‘De plaats van de kunst. Raadgevingen en uitspraken, verwijten’, in Guy Châtel and Mil De Kooning,Vlees & Beton 8 (1987), pp. 14–25 (16). This fascinating five-part essay is published in issue number 8 of Vlees & Beton, a series edited by Mil De Kooning. The essay was included in an issue that was guest edited by Guy Châtel and focuses on the exhibition Chambres d’Amis. The essay contains the architect’s recollections of Toroni’s contribution to Chambres d’Amis, three short reflective texts on the work of Isa Genzken, Thomas Schütte and Bruce Nauman, as well as a reproduction of a text work contributed by Lawrence Weiner to the aforementioned exhibition. Robbrecht’s essay is accompanied in the issue by a critical review of the exhibition by Lieven De Cauter, a reflection by Châtel on the contribution by Philip Van Isacker, and finally an interview by Katrien Vanermarliere with Dan Graham about his contribution. Dercon (‘Many Dreams of Many Gardens’, p. 22) refers to Robbrecht’s essay, which confirms that it was also partly written out of discontent with the collaborations with the artists who participated in the Theatergarden Bestiarium project.
23 Ibid., p. 17
24 Ibid., p. 18.
25 Niele Toroni, in Jan Hoet, ed., Chambres d’Amis, exh. cat., Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (Ghent, 1986), pp. 252–7 (256). Whereas Toroni’s first project proposal (projet 1) described only the painterly marks, the second proposal (projet 2) stipulated only that visitors needed to have a bottle of whisky at their disposal. In the final proposal (projet definitive), both previous proposals were merged, indicating that the artist indeed did make a compromise.
26 Paul Robbrecht, ‘De plaats van de kunst. Raadgevingen en uitspraken, verwijten’, in Guy Châtel and Mil De Kooning,Vlees & Beton 8 (1987), p. 18.
27 Bart Verschaffel, ‘Kunst komt thuis waar ze te gast is’, in Streven 54, nr 1 (oktober), 1986, as reprinted in Bart Verschaffel, ed., De glans der Dingen. Studies en kritieken over kunst en cultuur, Vlees & Beton (Mechelen, 1989), pp. 63–8.
28 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘A Conversation, November 1997. Farshid Moussavi and Paul Robbrecht’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), p. 150.
29 Lawrence Weiner, in Chambres d’Amis, exh. cat., Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst (Ghent, 1986), pp. 286–7; Paul Robbrecht, ‘De plaats van de kunst. Raadgevingen en uitspraken, verwijten’, in Guy Châtel and Mil De Kooning. Vlees & Beton 8 (1987), p. 25.
30 Bruce Nauman, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, 1968, sound installation, dimensions variable.
31 Christopher Wool, If You, 1992, enamel on aluminium, 274.3 x 182.8 cm.
32 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘Does Architecture Always Have To Be Good? Yes, Though the Art May Challenge That. A Conversation between Paul Robbrecht and Chris Dercon’, in Chris Dercon, Julian Heynen and Sara Weyns, Het Huis: Thomas Schütte Sculpturen; Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, Middelheim Museum (Antwerp, 2012), pp. 37–45 (43).
33 Paul Robbrecht, ‘Katoen Natie’, in Steven Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), pp. 105–8..
34 Paul Robbrecht, ‘Bilder, Vorübergehend an eine Wand gelehnt’, in Ulrich Loock, Kasper König and Ulrich Wilmes, eds, Raoul De Keyser, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bern (Bern and Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 55–6: ‘In creating his design the architect too relies on personal experience, intuition and his own conceptuality. But because of the nature of the design process, which brings with it an inevitable rationalization, these intimacies are concealed, internalized and disguised in the visible and intelligible building, which ultimately manifests itself in the form of a warm physical presence.’ Midway through the essay ‘The Place of Art. Recommendations and Statements. Admonitions’, at the end of the section devoted to the work of Thomas Schütte, Robbrecht included the following notable quotation: ‘The artist has to express his own experiences, make them obvious in the work of art, so they can become common knowledge. The architect has to hide all of them, make them to secrets closed into the walls, so the work of architecture can become anyone’s property. L.T.’ Whereas I at first suspected some cultural authority behind the capital letters of the signature, I later learned that they simply stand for the last letters of the author’s first name and surname. I wish to thank Mil De Kooning for solving this riddle.
35 Raymond Balau, ‘Displacement: Interview met  Paul Robbrecht’, A+ 119 (1992), pp. 47–9 (49): ‘In architectuur druk je geen gevoelens uit zoals ongeluk, evenmin als geluk overigens.’ (my translation).
36 Paul Robbrecht, Stefan Devoldere and Iwan Strauven, ‘A Conversation at the Home of Jean Prouvé’, in Stefan Devoldere, Maarten Delbeke and Iwan Strauven, Robbrecht en Daem: Pacing through Architecture, exh. cat., BOZAR (Brussels and Cologne, 2009), pp. 3–9 (4).
37 For this description of Wittgenstein’s decision, I refer to Bart Verschaffel, ‘On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle’, in Andrew Leach and John Macarthur, eds, Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts (Ghent, 2009), pp. 17–26 (19). 38. Paul Robbrecht, in ‘A Conversation, November 1997. Farshid Moussavi and Paul Robbrecht’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), p. 149.
38 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘A Conversation, November 1997. Farshid Moussavi and Paul Robbrecht’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem (Ghent, 1998), p. 149.
39 Ibid.
40 The architects also regard the Mys House as their first true testing ground for involving art in their architecture. Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem in conversation with the author, Robbrecht en Daem offices, Ghent, Tuesday 21 June 2016.
41 Dirk De Meyer, ‘Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem’, in Mil De Kooning, ed., Horta and After: 25 Masters of Modern Architecture in Belgium (Ghent, 2001), pp. 292–8 (294–6).
42 Steven Jacobs, ‘Unforgettable Places’, in S. Jacobs, ed., Works in Architecture: Paul Robbrecht & Hilde Daem(Ghent, 1998), p. 7.
43 Tony Fretton, ‘The Architects Viewed from a Nearby Island’, in Autonomous Architecture in Flanders, p. 210.
44 Paul Robbrecht, ‘De plaats van de kunst. Raadgevingen en uitspraken, verwijten’, in Guy Châtel and Mil De Kooning, Vlees & Beton 8 (1987), p. 17: ‘De subversiegaatzijnweglangs de elegantie.’ (my translation).
45 Iwona Blazwick, ‘A Work of Art Enters the Room’, 2G, Revista Internacional de Arquitectura 55 (III) (2010), p. 101.
46 For a historical account of the Whitechapel Art Gallery building, I refer to Stephen Escritt, ‘Charles Harrison Townsend, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Enigma of English Art Nouveau’, in Kathrina Schwarz and Hannah Vaughan, Rises in the East: A Gallery in Whitechapel (London, 2009), pp. 16–32.
47 Paul Robbrecht, Brief aan Geert Bekaert (14/11/88) (Ghent, 1988). I wish to thank my student Tim Willem for finding this letter in the Ghent City Archives.
48 Paul Robbrecht, ‘Bilder, Vorübergehend an eine Wand gelehnt’, in Ulrich Loock, Kasper König and Ulrich Wilmes, eds, Raoul De Keyser, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bern (Bern and Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 55–6: ‘Somewhere in me lives the romantic notion that a place, in this case, an architectural space, not only brings with it the expectation of human activity, but also of the image, the painting. Together they form an unforgettable place. A reminiscent focal point, detached from the everyday.’
49 Bart Cassiman, Paul Robbrecht Hilde Daem: De Architectuur en het Beeld, exh. cat., deSingel Antwerp (Antwerp, 1989), n.p.
50 For this reason I have left out the museum and exhibition designs by Robbrecht en Daem. Apart from the fact that they have already been discussed extensively in the past, I contend that the presence of art in the latter is distinct from the presence of art in non-art-related buildings.
51 Paul Robbrecht, in ‘Does Architecture Always Have To Be Good? Yes, Though the Art May Challenge That. A Conversation between Paul Robbrecht and Chris Dercon’, in Chris Dercon, Julian Heynen and Sara Weyns, Het Huis: Thomas Schütte Sculpturen; Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, Middelheim Museum (Antwerp, 2012), p. 41.
Original Publication: Wouter Davidts, “Double Up or In Unison. Encounters of Art and Architecture in the Work of Robbrecht en Daem architecten”, in An architectural Anthology (Brussels, 2017), p. 106.