KG:    I would almost dare to say that the most important thing you can do as an architect is introduce a set of references, a ruler, a measuring system. It’s almost like a trace of culture. So there is something there, and you don’t necessarily want to change that, but you do want to be able to grasp it, to control it to a certain extent. This idea of measuring, like a Cartesian grid, is very important for that.

         There’s a word painting by Ed Ruscha called “Talk about Space.” The tiny pencil in it is painted in full size, one to one. It allows you to measure the work, the tableau. It also allows you to measure, in some strange way, space. “Talk about Space,” you could say, is also measuring space.

          So this idea that you introduce elements to use as reference to something you cannot completely control is in many ways a common thread that runs through all our work. Call it classicism, rationalism, or other things, it always goes back to this attempt to make something part of a system, but at the same time allowing exceptions to that system. And exceptions are, of course, only possible as soon as you have put in enough effort to establish the system. If there is only exception, there is no system. So I think there is a search for equilibrium in our projects- more system than exception. This happens in many different ways and scales, and sometimes very literally.

 

DVS:    Measuring is repetition. A unit needs a second to make it a system. In the four rooms of the Weekend House, the nine (or actually 18 because it has two floors) rooms of Buggenhout, and the City Villa where columns frame the rooms, the common factor is rhythm. Rhythm frames the rooms. Creating rhythms or a multiplication of things is important, as it begins a background and fore- ground conversation where you see and yet don’t see, and it is the architecture that gives you the power to understand that discourse.