Office in Residence

Over the course of the biennial, several ‘offices’ take residence in the canteen for six consecutive weeks, turning it into an active public workspace and offering insight into the indefatigable process architects engage in with each project. Here, the project is the building itself: each week focuses on a distinct theme related to an architectural or infrastructural aspect of the building’s transformation. The format establishes a cumulative process in which each intervention may extend, reinterpret or question what came before.

The offices consist of existing international and local architectural practices, collectives, or groups assembled specifically for the biennial. All of them, with the exception of Arch+ in the opening week and the Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA) in the final week, were selected through an open call developed with the BMA. At the end of each phase, a public handover takes place: the departing offices present their research, drawings, models, or experiments and discuss them with the incoming teams and the public.

The residency thus operates simultaneously as workspace, forum and relay. Over the course of the biennial, the building gradually becomes the collective project of these successive occupations. Drawings, models, fragments and other traces accumulate in the space, forming an open experiment in collective authorship that informs the future architectural transformation of the former school building.