Cutting Holes into the Trash and Other Stories

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen is an architecture studio based in Flanders. Their work precisely corresponds to their native landscape: the mediocre, confused and domestic sprawl of contemporary Flanders, here understood as one of the many episodes of a similar global condition, an evenly covered field, more or less coinciding with the entire planet. The rarefied rooms repeatedly designed by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen cannot be thought to be outside of this field. While the rooms leave out the urban debris accumulated in this landscape, they would not make sense with- out it. There would be no pressure, no accumulated tension. The rooms extract power from the dirt around them; they burn into void the raw energy accumulated in the dirt. The rooms are defined by the absence of trash, and so trash plays a significant role in the definition of the rooms. Trash is the substance whose absence creates architecture. This also qualifies the architects’ method as potentially universal. It could probably work just as well in Egypt or Bangladesh, simply burning a different kind of trash, operating in a different degree of harshness.