2G 55 Robbrecht en Daem (2G: International Architecture Review)

Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem have been active as architects in the Belgian city of Ghent since 1975. Their work moves between the local traditions of Flemish building and a cosmopolitanism acquired, in the main, as a result of their collaborations with international artists on exhibition and museum spaces. Their thirty-five years in the profession are enough to reveal a mature body of work attentive to context and local technique, yet one aimed at going beyond the frontiers of their country. Their buildings address different typologies, from cultural buildings, spaces for art and public spaces to conversions of old offices, in which painstaking construction with traditional materials and schemes that are simple in layout and of great spatial richness inscribe their work within a certain central-European tradition of the ordinary.