Juliaan Lampens. Um Modo de Habitar

Abstract

The dissertation stems from a concern with the current housing crisis, understood as a complex issue encompassing social, political, economic, and architectural dimensions. Guided by the conviction that periods of crisis demand a return to the essential and fundamental, the study proposes a revisit to the work of the Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens (1926-2019). Despite a certain lack of international recognition, his architecture proves particularly relevant due to the contemporaneity of his stripped-down approach, carried to the irreducible necessary, and, above all, profoundly shaped by the lived experience of housing. In other words, Lampens' domestic architecture embodies a deep reflection on the act of inhabiting: the way of dwelling. The study focuses on the way of dwelling realized by Juliaan Lampens in the single-family houses he designed between 1960 and 2002. The research investigates how the architect's thinking about inhabiting is translated into architecture, through a continuous interplay between theoretical reflection and design practice. In this regard, it is essential to codify his thinking on inhabiting, a process that relies not only on bibliographic sources, - conversations, and interviews with Lampens -, but also requires direct engagement with his built work. Thus, the attentive reading of his ideas and the analysis of the houses, his mode of dwelling, develop in a parallel and interdependent manner, mutually informing one another. Given the scope of his work, the investigation concentrates on two emblematic houses - the Vandenhaute-Kiebooms House (1967) and the Van Wassenhove House (1974) - selected for their simultaneous complementarity and contrast, which are fundamental to understanding the breadth and versatility of Lampens' approach to dwelling. In summary, the dissertation seeks to understand what lies behind Lampens' idiosyncratic houses, exploring the elemental and fundamental dwelling experience they provide. It proposes a reading of his architecture that prioritizes inhabiting as a core premise of architectural practice, understood not as an autonomous object but as lived space, where human inhabiting constitutes a fundamental condition of existence, in an inseparable relationship between thought, space, and habitability.