2b, Bovenbouw Architectuur

Bovenbouw are an Antwerp based architecture practice headed by Dirk Somers. Their work ranges from high-end apartments in eclectic 19th century townhouses to robust yet elegant recycling plants and functional police and fire stations. Behind their colourful creation of space lies a deep understanding of the cultural significance of the found condition, combined with a playful yet reverent care for its material manifestations.

Introduction and arrangement of new accent pieces (Lovelingstraat townhouse)(Fig A)

“Making Architecture is the accumulative activity par excellence. Buildings are reconstructions of existing architectures, urban environments and landscape agglomerations. Cities are shaped layer after layer, generation after generation, project after project. It is precisely this historical accretion that lends the city meaning … Building is the rearrangement and alteration of the built-up landscape into new, clearly readable constellations” - Dirk Somers 28

This passage succinctly describes the approach of Bovenbouw from the urban to the detailed scale, and makes clear their ability to pivot between working with existing buildings and ‘new’ work. For Bovenbouw, they are one and the same. How then should they respond when much of the accumulative layering of a long lived building has been scrubbed away by a previous actor?

28 Maarten Van den Driessche and Dirk

Somers, Living the exotic Every day, (Flanders, 2019), 148-9.

(Fig A) The view from the living room reveals just one composition of the many fragments.

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(Fig B) Site plan, project shown in Black. Such was the condition found in a typical Flemish terrace housing on Lovelingstraat, Antwerp (Fig B). Dirk Somers admits that without his personal interest in the project, he might not have taken it on29. The clients where his neighbours and he knew that whatever extensions they carried out would be visible from his bedroom window. What appears as a fine 19th century townhouse from the exterior has suffered significant amputations internally during a 1970s makeover. Doors, floors and general details had been lost in favour of linoleum and fibreboard that had not stood the test of time. This is

not necessarily the disaster that it is usually presented as, Somers notes that the experience of these buildings as they were originally intended is often heavy, dark and visually complex. Thus the common approach to similar conditions, where these details have not been lost, is to paint it a light monochrome colour, picking out specific features and nice elements as accents (Fig C).

Bovenbouw take on this approach in a suitably sideways fashion; all new architectural interventions are brightly coloured. These coloured showpiece elements then takes on the role of the reverently found detail. This then gives Bovenbouw the freedom to create compositions and arrangements of these fragments throughout the building (Fig D). When viewed from different places one witnesses several sublime arrangements of fragments collaged in different ways against the white backdrop of the building (Fig E). Somers explains the process of carefully creating architectural compositions from found and introduced fabric as akin to the creation of picturesque lanscapes30. In his descriptions somers evoks both Colin Rowe’s Collage City and Humphry Repton, the 18th century Landscape designer who unlike his forbears would incorporate borrowed items such as church towers, making them seem part of his picturesque composition.

(Fig C) Local Antwerp hotel project by Vincent Van Duysen. Monochrome painting of details in the fashion described by Dirk Somers.

29 Dirk Somers, Nye Former (New forms), (Oslo Arkitektforening, 2021)

30 Dirk Somers, A kind of picturesque introduction essay to Buildings - Sergison

Bates architects (Quart-Verlag, 2012)

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(Fig D) Collage describing the many coloured fragments that are arranged around the building.

(Fig E) Selected other views of how the different coloured fragments can be viewed around the building.

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(Fig F) Grand opening in existing wall, light shared between rooms.

Dirk Somers and his team brought this approach to a larger project - three large 19th century merchants’ houses, also in Antwerp (Fig G). The brief was to create 8 rental apartments out of 3 large family homes. This had the key change of switching the grain of the circulation from broadly vertical with independent entrances to broadly horizontal with a shared stair. The historic façade of the building presented a highly eclectic neo-baroque composition with elements from all over the world. A key ambition of the project was to bring the quite plain interiors up to the level of opulence and playfulness that the façade suggested (Fig H).

(Fig H) Faded and drab interior atmospheres as found by the architect juxtapose to an opulent façade.

(Fig G) Isometric showing internal arrangement and circulation of new flats in relation to the opulent facades.

(Fig I) Visual connection between Gordon Matta-Clark’s spherical voids cut from structures and the square voids cut out by the architect.

Bovenbouw again embark on a grand reinterpretation, thinking about their reshaping of the building fabric in terms of a landscape they are shaping for their purposes. Where Humphry Repton would create grand vistas in his landscapes to bring views of a distinct church to the house of his patron, Bovenbouw cut large 3 dimensional Matta-Clark-esque voids in the fabric bringing the city scape deep into the plan (Fig I). These holes both exaggerate and de-construct the cellular nature of the existing building, creating frames through which the light and the inhabitant can flow.

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Bovenbouw have also taken a unique approach to reusing the large chimneys, what might have been redundant space. Their hollow depth is revealed by knocking through portals, which are occasionally framed with new fireplaces. Somers likens these fireplaces to the work of Edwin Lutyens, who in his grand houses would treat the doorways and fireplaces as if they are in conversation with each other (Fig K). This dialog is taken further by Somers, who uses the motif to create cupboards, bed headboards and even kitchen extracts (Fig. L).

(Fig J) One of many newly introduced mantelpieces, with a hole cut in the chimney breast.

(Fig K) Design connection between doorway and fireplace in Lutyens’ Daneshill House.

Furthermore, hidden in the speckled colours of these fireplaces is a direct link to the memory of the space as found by the architect. Used for many years as shabby student accommodation, the presumably fine original mantelpieces were long gone, but what remained was a collection of gas and electric fires with their own nostalgic charm (Fig M).

(Fig L) Selected newly introduced mantelpieces, fulfilling roles from purely decorative to doorways, cupboards and even bed headboards. (Fig M) Electric and Gas fires removed as part of the renovation, their colours informing the choices in the introduced mantelpieces.

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