Reflections on a Lecture by Paul Robbrecht

Matthew Beattie

"�architects give materials to the user..."

The means with which any architecture can affect the experience of the user are, by definition, material - the architect does not "create" space or light but must strategically employ matter to lend form and measure to sensation, in the hope that meaningful human experience might emerge.

In the work of Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, an acute sensitivity to these facts - to the limits of architecture - seems both to frame an unpretentious commitment to authenticity and to form the conceptual basis for an ambitious program to maximize the potential for what architecture - in conjunction with art and the engaged user - can achieve.

"�inhabiting materials..."

Materials are calmly invited to express their specific qualities of being and are not laboured with rhetorical demands - material as pure presence, describing space without recourse to orthodox emotional associations of weight or texture and without ostentatious articulation.

Not pulling apart layers of material to accommodate inhabitation but conceptualizing space as another stratum, the whole as a kind of laminated composite.

"�our work always seems to be related to trains, to train carriages, to movement and transport�"

The spaces thus delineated are not neutral but seem to possess a grain and a bias and a palpable sense of direction - expectant, anticipating the movement and experience of the user. This quality seems related to the powerful appeal of authentic, unpretentious places and spaces - the sense that inhabitation is crucial to their ultimate realization: that for them to be empty is to be incomplete.

The rhythm and proportioning of spaces precludes the possibility for full experience on a purely visual basis, as a passive spectator from a single, static vantage point. But not choreographed, not didactic - in his lecture to the AAI last April, Tony Fretton spoke of his belief that architecture should "invite, not proscribe, use." If there is a sense of the scenographic, the user is always both actor and audience, implicated in deciding the course of action.

In the same talk, Fretton distinguished between the "focused view" and the "ambient view." This latter concept seems of particular relevance to a consideration of the work of Robbrecht en Daem - without framing singular, explicit references to the landscape, close proximity to the outside appears to be subtly reiterated and continuously renegotiated as the user moves through the buildings. The experience of the buildings is thus presented as a continuum of, and not a substitute for, the user's experience of the wider world - in a sense the spaces are all threshold, insistently maintaining a critical position relative to conventions of the internal and external.

�architecture should be able to accept the provocation of the art piece..."

The architecture is not a void in which the art is suspended, offering no resistance, but nor is it in itself an experience already complete - the aim is to engender an acute attentiveness in the user, in order that the art piece might be met halfway in a reciprocally-challenging transaction.

The architect Florian Beigel relates this latent - yet under-exploited - capacity for architecture to stimulate awareness to Paul Klee's concept of the "thinking eye" and to the distancing strategies employed in the "epic theatre" of Bertolt Brecht.

The encounter between the receptive user and the art piece shapes unexpected moments that punctuate and constructively disturb the experience of the buildings.

The distinction between the memorable and the unforgettable - the unforgettable is indelibly written through the experience of the body: a felt memory.

Matthew Beattie is an architect with Grafton Architects.