23 – 24 April 2009
Lamot Congress & Heritage Centre, Mechelen

To the occasion of the kick-off of the European exchange program City Visions Europe, the conference New Vocabularies for the European City exposes the challenges of contemporary architecture in building the European City.

Beyond the stylistic debate around contemporary iconic building, it is the more general observation that architecture in present fails to develop, represent and materialize a common understanding of the shared space of the city, that will form the central issue of the design-research program City Visions Europe. Themes that have always been at the centre of architectural practice and research, such as housing typologies and the urban pattern, neighborhood models, as well as the layout of infrastructures, are no longer the dominant vectors of architectural discourse and are mostly absent from office’s portfolios.

The conference departs from the observation that, over the past two decades, the ‘urban project’ or the acupunctural intervention, often as part of a strategic project to restructure the city’s territory, has become the predominant framework for the production of contemporary architecture. While the ‘urban project’ is often the engine of urban restructuring, it has also become the vehicle for city-marketing strategies and the pursuit of a ‘Bilbao-effect’ in both large and small cities. Nevertheless, beside the characteristic profusion of monuments, cities in Europe are generally known for the relative architectural coherence of their city-parts and, related to this, the continuity of their public spaces. While the search for exceptionality and continuous formal renewal define the current architectural trend, it is the accumulation of a shared architectural vocabulary or the ‘common’ architectural answers that have built the different imageries of the European city.

Participants to the conference are amongst others Dominique Boudet (AMC/ Le Moniteur), Joachim Declerck (Berlage Institute), Michiel Dehaene (University of Eindhoven), Bruno De Meulder (University of Eindhoven), Filip Geerts (University of Delft), Bernardo Secchi (Studio Secchi-Vigano, Milan), Vladimir Slapeta (Brno University), Peter Stabel (University of Antwerp), Martino Tattara (Berlage Institute), Ines Weizman (London) and the eight architecture offices selected for the design-research program l’AUC (Paris, FR), Berger&Berger (Paris, FR), GGNA (Bratislava, SK), Jan De Vylder architecten (Ghent, BE), Office KGDVS (Brussels, BE), Raumbureau (Zürich, CH), RKAW (Prague, CZ) and zerozero+totalstudio (Presov, SK).