Homes for Luxembourg
Exhibition
22.05, – 21.11.2021
Address
Luxembourg Pavilion
Arsenale, Sale d’Armi, 1st Floor
Venice
Commissioner
Ministry of Culture
Curators
LUCA - Luxembourg Center for Architecture & Sara Noel Costa De Araujo
Exhibitors
Studio SNCDA et al. (Sara Noel Costa De Araujo, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Ester Goris, Arnaud Hendrickx)
With the support of
LuXembourg - Let’s make it happen
On the occasion of the 2021 Venice Biennale, the LUCA – Luxembourg Center for Architecture invited architect Sara Noel Costa De Araujo to explore the concept of modular living. Studio SNDCA responded by overlapping the curatorial approach with the actual design of modular, mobile housing units to be set in clusters on the many vacant plots of building land in Luxembourg. This speculative project can thus be read as an engaged attempt to match the international exhibition with domestic concerns about the housing crisis.
Studio SNCDA’s design for modular housing units walk a tightrope between other typologies: minimal in space requirement yet fully equipped, they refuse the concept of “tiny houses”. They should neither look like emergency containers nor be piled up like a dense housing block. Tapping into the local desire for individual houses on a garden plot, they need to look like fragile villas landing gently on the ground – no need for deep foundations – yet comfortably petit bourgeois, to accommodate both the inhabitants and their neighbours.
The units are thin and slender: the basic 52 m² configuration measures 3.9 by 14.4 m,(1) with a glazed façade running along three sides and a back wall integrating storage space, the kitchen and smaller openings. The interior is an open space, only partitioned by the bathroom block, which mediates access to the bed, and by two curtains: the first encircles the bed, the second hides the kitchen worktop or, when drawn, divides the living area into two equal parts. With such minimal housing, inhabitants are projected outside. Depending on the size of the plot, several units can be deployed and accommodate different households and domestic programmes: singles alone, singles sharing, small or larger families, students or workers.
(1) Building regulations vary for each municipality. In Luxemburg City, the minimum surface for any housing unit is 52 m2. Source: Accattone #7 (May 2021) p104 Homes for Luxembourg Studio SNCDA et al. at the Venice Architecture Biennale
Curatorial Team
Sara Noel Costa De Araujo
Architect and scenographer (Belgium, 1974)
Architect and scenographer, she is the founder and director of the architectural practice Studio SNCDA, based in Brussels and Luxembourg.
Sara Noel Costa de Araujo started working in 2000 as an architect after graduating from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) in London. She first gained experience with Zaha Hadid Architects in London and Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna. From 2003, she worked as a project manager at Xaveer De Geyter Architects, where she was responsible for designing and implementing architectural projects within the agency. Since 2014, Sara Noel Costa de Araujo has been building an autonomous and independent practice based on her various professional experiences.
Scenographers-exhibitors Studio SNCDA
Studio SNCDA has a special relationship with research, innovation, and the implementation of research projects. That is why every project, whatever its scale, is seen as a pretext to develop a new method to create a unique project. Over the years, this research has resulted in an independent « Gesamtcollage » project, which brings together thoughts about an autonomous and sustainable city system. The work of Studio SNCDA was exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale (Italy), the Architecture Triennial in (Portugal), the LUCA Luxembourg Center for Architecture (Luxembourg), the FRAC Orléans (France), and Etablissement d’En Face (Brussels).
Ester Goris
Architect (Belgium, 1971)
Ester Goris graduated as an architect in 1994 from the College of Science and Art, Sint-Lucas Brussels (Belgium). Until 2013, she worked as a project manager at the office of Xaveer De Geyter Architects, among others, on the Mies van der Rohe nominated projects ‘Chassé Park flats’ (NL) and ‘College of Europe’ (BE). In 2007 she worked as a designer on two collections by Olivier Theyskens in the Nina Ricci studio in Paris. Since 2012, the work of Studio Staartster, which she founded together with Dagmar Pelger, has continued in Studio Ester Goris, where architecture and textiles increasingly coincide. An investigative approach to collaborations results in unique responses to a wide variety of commissions. Ester often works with and for artists such as Lieven De Boeck, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Valérie Mannaerts and Michael Van den Abeele… She teaches both disciplines at Ghent University, Syntra Brussels and, at her public school in Sint-Joost-Ten-Noode.
Arnaud Hendrickx
Architect (Belgium, 1970)
Arnaud Hendrickx graduated as an architect in 1994 from the College of Science and Art, Sint-Lucas Brussels (Belgium). After working for other architectural firms, he co-founded RAUW architects with Thierry Berlemont and Bart Callens. His current spatial artistic practice focuses more on artist collaborations, artefacts, installations, and exhibitions than on buildings. He teaches and researches the overlapping field of art and architecture as an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture of KU Leuven, Campus Sint-Lucas, Brussels (B). Until 2018 he was an assistant professor at RMIT University, School of Architecture and Design, Melbourne (AU), where he also obtained his PhD with his thesis and exhibition ‘Substantiating Displacement’.
Koenraad Dedobbeleer
Visual artist (Belgium, 1975)
As a visual artist, he was laureate at “de Ateliers” Amsterdam in 2000, and since, has been showing internationally. Over the years, he has been developing a growing interest in architecture, which eventually led him to become a regular contributor of architect Kris Kimpe on several exhibition scenographies and other small-scale architectural interventions. With the latter, he co-founded the fanzine UP in 2006. He granted the Mies van der Rohe Award for art in 2009. He was appointed professor of Sculpture at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2019.
