Construction of Incident

How do we construct an architecture that is informal, an architecture that exists outside of ourselves? This publication, the output of a design research project with students from the RWTH Aachen Lehrstuhl für Gebäudelehre, explores this very question through a specific dogma.

The project builds upon the causal nature of industrial structures. These are buildings often developed without any deliberate compositional intent; their form is purely dictated by the constraints of the industrial processes they house and the modularity of their building systems. They are functional, not artistic.

The core of the research involves taking these same structures and reimagining them using historic architectural syntaxes. This process is treated like a game of translation, where the language of a classical or other historical style is applied to the raw, functional logic of the industrial form.

The resulting structures are not born from the architect’s personal intent or vision. Instead, they emerge from the interplay between two distinct elements: the causal logic of the borrowed industrial structure and the language of the style that is applied to it. This approach creates an architecture that is both foreign and familiar, a product of a disciplined process rather than a free-form creative act. It is, in essence, an architecture constructed outside of the self, guided by a set of rules and constraints rather than by individual preference.

Editor: Marius Grootveld

€ 24,50
LEMON PRESS
September 2025, English
ISBN: 978-90-834983-0-0

B/W & Silver, 23 x 33,5 cm
48 p, Saddle Stitch, design: Andreas Depauw

© 2025 Marius Grootveld, Ghent