Twenty years ago, Jörn Aram Bihain and Thierry Decuypere founded V+ (which stands for Vers plus de bien-être, “towards more well-being”) in Brussels. And for twenty years they have been re-assessing design briefs for project proposals that belong neither to the Flemish school nor to the rather splintered Walloon production. Yet, precision and poetry put V+ among the best representatives of the contemporary Belgian architectural scene.

A project is one step forward, two steps back.” The founders of V+, both born in 1973, are not the only ones to view the talent of an architect as the art of negotiation. In April 2018, Belgian magazine A+ devoted a whole issue to “Resistance & Negotiation”, showing that, in Belgium, any architectural commission is sys-tematically re-assessed; be it a public or, even more so, a private commission. “We’ve learned to talk with our clients, which makes us less reliant on certain architectural dogmas,” Bihain and Decuypere emphasise. “To sacrifice a vision on the shrine of architectural dogma” is out of the question. In some cases, V+ boldly limit their intervention to a meticulous restoration, revealing the potential of the existing building, such as those of the garden-city of Haren, North-East of Brussels, where what mattered was to simply recover the radiance lost through successive restorations and subsequent abandonment of the place. “In this instance, the project consisted in doing nothing.” 

Classifying V+ is not easy because each project is so very unique, as shown by the excellent exhibition V+ 2014-2015 at Bozar (Brussels) in 2015. V+ do not tend towards the hyper-gridded plans that delight their fellow architects; they are not prone to favour one material over another… From the Nova cinema in Brussels in 2003 to that of Marcq-en-Baroeul (Nord) in France, the design of which is in progress, none of V+’s buildings are alike. This is partly due to their collaboration with other offices – MDW for the building of the RTBF headquarters (completion planned for 2021), MS-A and TRANS for the building of 130 flats in Molenbeek (design in progress) – which “allows for a broader spectrum of projects, a bigger workforce and more fun,” they explain. 

Click here to read the full article from the issue 425 of AA.