BAUKUNST: Pensées

The editorial idea

The publication «Pensées» is the result of the long work carried out by the Brussels architecture agency: BAUKUNST.

Construction of collisions of ideas, mix of thoughts, which brings out new images, silences, certainties, doubts, worlds, and which presents us a method of thinking and composing. The drawing of a portrait of the Belgian office BAUKUNST.

The present work is composed of voluntarily fragmentary parts assembled in a triptych form taking again Words, Definitions, and Quotations.

The Words are organized in the form of an abecedary and belong to vast and varied disciplinary fields.

The Definitions are selected among a field of possible meanings for each word.

The Citations are extracted from books directly from the agency’s library:

— Michel Serres, Statues, 1987

— William James, Les principes de la psychologie, 1890

— Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues, 1977

— Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la raison pure, 1781

— Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957

— Thierry De Duve, Résonances du readymade, 1989

— Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, 1900

— Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 1923

— Charles Baudelaire, Critique d’art, 1868

— etc.

They were selected spontaneously, over a short period, from the annotations included in the books as they were read. The quotations were carefully scanned. We decided to preserve the integrity of each of the original pages.

The structure of the book follows a repetitive, mechanical process, allowing, over the pages, to put the text in motion like animated images.

The graphic elements of the project and the search for coherence is designed in collaboration with the Parisian graphic design studio Spassky Fischer, with whom Cosa Mentale has been collaborating since 2014.

BAUKUNST

BAUKUNST composes. Assembles. Brings together. Connects. Creates unpublished relationships between these fragments that exist, and in the form in which they exist.

BAUKUNST resonates as the reminiscence of preoccupations that no longer occupy the forefront of the contemporary architectural scene. To reintroduce the art of building today, and to borrow this term with its strong meaning within the discipline, sounds like an ambition all the greater, as the gap with the meaning of «building» today seems to be wide. And this ambition rises at first contact, in the immediacy of the encounter with this word. The name of the office is written in capital letters.

BAUKUNST projects us into their imagination through this publication and we discover that these skillfully orchestrated assemblages make images dance behind our eyelids, which find a form of Nature. We thus see how these collisions, encounters, and shortcuts come to life through the interpretations they arouse and the meanings they awaken.

This book shows how to play with the pre-established, universal rules that guide the construction of a project within a clear logic. It constructs a constellation of images left to the readers so that everyone can draw the outlines.

Support this project!

We strongly believe in the importance of this book. We have been working on this project for a long time, and we continue to develop and discuss it with the Baukunst office. With your support, you will make this project possible! We are working hard to present the book to you in the coming months!