The stories manifest themselves during the design process, or come into being during that design process. After which the projects adapt themselves to the stories. What are Cuyvers’s stories all about? They are not about typical architectonic things – or at least, the things many architects regard as typically architectonic. They are not about the relationship between the various elements of the brief, nor about the characteristics of the site, nor technological innovation, the play of light and dark or spatial effects. They are primarily about human actions and feelings, about things like voyeurism, irritation, loneliness.

Cuyvers is fascinated by stories, by the grand narratives of modern literature. In the catalogue of his work published in 1995 by deSingel in Antwerp, Cuyvers wrote: `I have been transposing, translating and drawing out novels into architectural projects for more than fifteen years. The acute, icy cool observations of Cesare Pavese, the well-wrought constructions of James Joyce, the insistent, sacral texts of Georges Bataille, Marcel Proust’s desire to return to childhood.’ He went on to quote a statement by Milan Kundera that stresses the importance of these novels: `The novel is a child of modern times. Their mirror, guide and co-creator. … If at any time anyone still wants to reflect on the existence of man in the late-modern period and in the future that will ensue from it, he will have to return to these novels, to all great novels in fact. They carry all the existential wisdom of the fading Modern Period within them.’1)
Cuyvers, who is involved in architectural education in Ghent and Tilburg, also gets his students to play around with literature. Which goes to show that he does not regard his preoccupation with literature as a personal hobby, but as an essential acquisition of insight into the world in which we work. In one project he had his students study novels – of the calibre of Dostoevsky and Kafka – and the authors’ biographies. The existential doubt so characteristic of these writers and their work had then to be converted into an architectural project. More anecdotal is Cuyvers’s remark about the criterion he employs when people apply to him for a job or traineeship. In fact, he confides, the only thing he pays attention to initially is whether the applicant has a good command of language and is capable of composing an effective and faultless letter. Apparently, this criterion greatly simplifies the selection process.
What Cuyvers recognizes in modern novelists is the desire to take basic human feelings and actions as the point of departure in a project. What is possible in a novel, is also possible in architecture, witness the projects illustrated here. It brings architecture to life, turns it into a meaningful life story.
Cuyvers says he is above all inspired by negative forces, by friction. His projects elucidate, draw attention to, this tension. In the aforementioned catalogue therefore, Cuyvers almost apologizes for a project – then still on the drawing table, now realized – in which the provision of sanctuary was the central theme: the extension of the Peeters-Danneels house in Ghent. The clients are the managers of a service station on the busy, four-lane state highway 66. Their tiny dwelling bordered the road and had no garden. Beside and behind the house is a car repair shop and a hire firm for trucks and cranes. A stone’s throw away is the E40 motorway. How to give this family, which does of course earn its living from the chaotic modern condition with which it is intimately involved, a measure of seclusion?
Cuyvers slid a new volume over the existing dwelling. This new volume was kept structurally independent of the original house so as to cause as little inconvenience as possible to the occupants, whose job left them no option but to continue living there during the reconstruction.
The last little scrap of green landscape stretches away behind the neighbouring house. The new rooms in the raised volume are able to take full advantage of this view. A huge roof terrace, surrounded by a high parapet, turns its back on the surroundings and concentrates on the only truly liberating open space, the sky. The most interesting spot in the project, the place that encapsulates what is at issue in this assignment, is the stairway to the roof: covered and part of the building volume to be sure, but nonetheless an outdoor space that is not fully contained by the new volume. Look up and the shelter of the roof garden beckons, look down and the space acquires a telescopic effect that catapults the occupants straight into the repair shop.
Another recent project seems to be similarly infused with compassion. In the garden of a violinist’s house in Ghent, Cuyvers has built a practice room. Inside, the room is designed as one large piece of furniture. A timber construction that incorporates cupboard space for scores and administration and a heating system to protect the sensitive instruments, ensures decent acoustics and at the same time orders the room. Cuyvers reveals that the design evolved out a long talk with the client which covered, among other things, the latter’s constant, oppressive concern for the safety of his instrument. The wooden piece of furniture is, as it were, an extra case within the pavilion, intended to exclude this anxiety.
Something of this tension between individuals and the world around them is also evident in the research laboratory Cuyvers built in Zwijnaarde. In the clover leaf formed by the intersection of the E17 (Antwerp-Kortrijk) and E40 (Brussels-Oostende) stand the architecturally unassuming business premises of Inno Genetics where research is carried out into viral infections, blood disorders, tissue culture and the like.
Cuyvers’s new laboratory building for the fast-growing company merges seamlessly with the anonymous surroundings. One aspect fascinates though. On the roof is a dwelling for the ‘chef maintenance’. In view of the vulnerable materials in the laboratory, which moreover constitute a potential danger to public health, a maintenance engineer must be on hand 24 hours a day to deal with emergencies. Cuyvers has felt intuitively what it must be like to live on the job, on such an inhospitable, post-industrial site as this, and has restored the occupant’s freedom. The secret is in the detailing of the roof of the laboratory building on which the dwelling stands. By causing the roof to bulge slightly, covering it with precast concrete units and dispensing with upstands, the roof becomes a deck. Cuyvers compares it with an aircraft carrier, but perhaps a supertanker would be apter still: a silent, autonomous environment, high above the waves and far removed from the inhabited world. Looking out of the dwelling across the deck, it is as though the enterprise has vanished from the face of the earth. The occupant’s horizon has been raised far above the day-to-day commercial worries. Naturally this solution has a downside. The occupant is granted not only well-earned peace and quiet but also the isolation of the captain on the bridge of his supertanker: there is no sign of other crew members in this private dwelling, and a port is forever beyond the reach of this immobile tanker.
The extension to the Potemans residence, currently under construction in Kessel-Lo, is described by Cuyvers as ‘a bureaucratic gift’. He can easily mention several examples of this kind of project. They are the result of bureaucratic procedure. After the design process has got off to a good start, the local authorities hit the roof when the building application is submitted. Suddenly new preconditions are conjured up out of the blue, so that the design must be drastically modified. This is the signal for Cuyvers to dig his toes in. The sport is to find some way of expressing the arbitrariness of the regulations in the new design.
Initially, the plan for the extension to the dwelling in Kessel-Lo provided for a new volume behind the house in the deep, cranked back garden. On the one hand, a closed courtyard would be created between the house and the extension, on the other hand the living room in the new volume, situated beyond the bend in the plot, would focus explicitly on the empty landscape.
The plan was rejected on account of the building depth, even though there were no regulations governing this on paper. ‘That’s not how we do it here’, Cuyvers was told, whereupon he insisted on being given a very precise statement of the limiting conditions. He was told, among other things, that the 9-metre-deep house could have six metres added to it and that it should be obvious from the stated maximum heights that the extension would have to have a sloping roof. Cuyvers’s subsequent design satisfied all requirements, although he put the sloping roof the ‘wrong’ way round. So, while the house still resolutely turns its face towards the landscape, the oddly shaped extension projects a sense of enclosure that expresses the curtailment of freedom. Cuyvers compares the extension with the protective collar dogs and cats sometimes have to wear around their head.
In 1997, the Christelijke Mutualiteiten (Christian Home Help) in Ghent invited Cuyvers to take part in a limited competition to design a ‘mediotheque’, a hire centre for medical aids like crutches and wheelchairs. The competition provided for the demolition of an existing corner premises in the centre of Ghent, on an approach road from the direction of Brugge and Oostende. No winner has been designated and it now looks as if the building plans have been scrapped.
The design shows Cuyvers at his most confrontational. The superstructure consists of two storeys containing six apartments. The medical facility is located in the fully glazed base. The two street fronts of the corner building are conceived as enormous show cases in which the medical aids for hire are displayed. Cuyvers says that he had two images in mind: that of the crutches in the grotto at Lourdes, said to have been left behind by pilgrims unaccountably cured of their handicap on the spot, and that of the showcases in the museum at Auschwitz, crammed with the prostheses, spectacle frames and other aids belonging to the victims of the gas chambers. The extreme nature of these images may seem out of all proportion to the unquestioned position that an institution such as the ‘mediotheque’ enjoys in our society, but this is obviously the very point Cuyvers wants to make: we have banished the big existential feelings from our lives and we forget how they can enrich daily life.
Cuyvers is, in the nicest possible way, uncompromising. He fights opposition with patience. It is an attitude both welcome and fitting in Flemish architectural practice. But the ‘canalside house’ he designed as part of Sjoerd Soeters’s masterplan for Java Island in Amsterdam is also a good example. In his commentary on this recalcitrant design, published in the 1995 catalogue, he made no secret of his objections to Soeters’s design: ‘In his plan, Soeters is putting his money on differentiation and individuality. He divided up the island, a fine elongated stretch of land in the broad waters of the IJ, into various blocks alongside the water. After Soeters had pulled the splendid whole to pieces in his urban planning design, he then had to lay down ‘a thousand and one’ rules to lead all this forced, artificial ‘individuality and differentiation’ in the right direction. What this will all finally look like can be seen on the Belgian coast. … Soeters will be cutting four artificial canals crosswise through the island. For centuries the whole of the Netherlands has been fighting to win back land from the water and here the island is being cut through with canals. … Soeters may like associating himself with kitsch, but here he is playing an arrogant, sarcastic game to which the Amsterdam property market is responding positively.’ ‘With the ease of the crudest ready-made company’, the canal houses designed by the ‘young heroes’ ‘will be built twice, once according to the design model and once in mirror image. The totally altered orientation does not appear to worry anyone.’
Since he wrote this, Cuyvers kept having the distinct impression that his continued collaboration on the plan was being discouraged – not that he let this faze him. In June, however, following a process lasting seven years – for a house, would you believe! – he was given to understand that the plans to build his two corner houses had definitely been axed. In their place Moes the property developer has simply duplicated the houses designed by two of the other ‘young heroes.’ Although these architects – Dirk De Meyer and Babet Galis – have formally protested against this act of fratricide, their hands are tied. Moes has bought their designs (it’s in black and white in the contract) and can have them built from one end of the Netherlands to the other if it chooses. Soeters can shout heterogeneity all he likes, but power games are not to be scoffed at either.

1. Wim Cuyvers, Kristien Gerets, Katrien Vandermarliere (eds.) Wim Cuyvers, Antwerp (deSingel) 1995, p. 130. Text in Dutch and English.