DE-AD

by Wim Cuyvers

In his new publication ‘DE-AD’, architect-artist-writer-forestier Wim Cuyvers bundles both recent and new essays as well as designs of architectural projects that were never executed. ‘DE-AD’ can be seen as the sequel to the successful ‘Text Over Text’ from 2005.

With ‘DE-AD’ Cuyvers on the one hand makes an overview of the spaces he searched and searches for, and he abstracts and names the elements that characterize those spaces; on the other hand, in this book he makes his world view explicit.
The graphic design by Filiep Tacq treats the essays and drawings in an equal way, together they lead to the culmination of Cuyvers’ thinking about public space, a thinking that also determines Cuyvers’ architectural practice.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Architecture

212 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a man who rails at the complacency, the cowardice and the falsehood that is corroding our relationship with ourselves and the world. His universe is starkly existential, denuded of the trappings of consumerism, of greed, of the domestic, of desire to control and to belong. He is an architect, but not in the sense that he merely solves functional puzzles in space. His architecture is cosmology: a reflection of the deep mythic and symbolic structure of the world that human beings have constructed for themselves on this planet. Human beings as place-finding organisms. Places anchored in biological and spiritual need, places where we defiantly, anxiously struggle with the foundational Law that props up co-existence. People are not here to dwell and to know, but to doubt and to roam, to hide and expose themselves behind a tenuous screen of parkland bushes. Settling is serfdom. Architecture is the making of the non-home, of the non-conditioned space, of the space where internalised control is short-circuited. In the end, there is only one question: our common destiny in the face of death. Hence the proliferation of graves and tombs, sprouting from the urban fabric like tufts of grass from the paving stones. Children's classrooms open out over cemeteries. Necropoles rather than department stores occupy the centers of cities. Crematoria expose themselves to the drone and dust of the motorway. Not for the fainthearted.