An Fonteyne (1971) is an architect and professor of architectural design.
She grew up in Ostend (Belgium) and graduated as an architect at Ghent University in 1994. She worked at DKV architecten in Rotterdam and David Chipperfield architects in London.
In 2000 she founded noAarchitecten together with Jitse van den Berg and Philippe Viérin. Their work is based on a strong confidence in the future of urban society. They do not see architecture as a discipline that is practised in isolation, but as a continuous conversation that they like to have with other critical thinkers from various disciplines. As a team of about twenty people, noAarchitecten is working on a rich oeuvre of very diverse buildings, including public institutions, housing and transformations of historical buildings. Their work arises in a strong connection with the layered history of building, but at the same time focuses on the contemporary conditions of living together.
Since 2017, An Fonteyne has also been a partner at Atelier Kanal, the architecture collective that was founded between noAarchitecten, EM2N (Zurich) and Sergison Bates (London) for the transformation of the former Citroen garage into Kanal, a museum and workshop for modern and contemporary art, performance and architecture in Brussels.
Since 2019 An Fonteyne is an elected member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. An Fonteyne is Professor of Architecture and Design at ETH Zurich since 2017. Previously, she was a lecturer at TU Delft and a professor at Hasselt University. An Fonteyne lives and works in Brussels and Zurich and has two children.
Emma Kaufmann LaDuc is an architect and landscape architect based in Zurich. She graduated in architecture from TU Wien and in landscape architecture from ETH Zurich. Through searching and researching, she works within immediate territories to contextualise both the material and the labor immanent to spatial practice. Emma runs an experimental unit on landscapes at the AA Summer School in London (UK) and collaborates with the interdisciplinary collective La Rivoluzione delle Seppie in Calabria (IT).
Ties Linders studied at TU Eindhoven and ETH Zürich. After graduating in 2010 at the Studio of Christian Rapp, he worked at several offices in the Netherlands and in Zürich, among which Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven architecten and Mathis Kamplade, where he delivered a house in Wollishofen and was involved in several competitions. Since graduation he also worked on his own projects in Eindhoven, Amsterdam and Zürich, ranging from small extensions to competitions.
Géraldine Recker is an architect and photographer based in Zurich. She studied at ETH Zürich and Harvard GSD and previously worked for Conen Sigl, Lütjens Padmanabhan, David Chipperfield, and Hélène Binet. In 2021 she co-founded the architecture office studio OLAC, which is working internationally on architecture projects, exhibitions, and workshops. A special interest lies in the presence of infrastructures, resources and hidden processes in the urban fabric, which she first explored in a joint diploma project on water infrastructure in 2019 and which she is also examining in her photographic work.
Els Silvrants-Barclay is a curator, researcher and activist. She is associate researcher at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies, and coordinator of Permanent, a practice-based research project that draws upon anti-speculative models from the commons- and cooperative economy and proposes spatial typologies of difference to develop an infrastructure for a multitude of uses and users to ‘be in it together without needing to be the same’. She regularly works as a curator for public art commissions. Her practice is centered on the politics of spatial production, looking at space as affective, as choreography of bodies, as reflective and reproductive of worldviews, and assembles around the question on how to think and produce space otherwise.
Till 2019 she directed the contemporary arts center Netwerk Aalst. Previously she led a collaboration between four contemporary art museums in Belgium. She coordinated the Advanced Master in Theatre Studies, lectured dance theory and was part of the Research Centre for Visual Poetics at the University of Antwerp. Before she lived in Beijing where she co-founded the Institute for Provocation, a workspace for artists and architects.
Edoardo Signori studied architecture at the ETH Zurich where he graduated in 2021. Apart from working for multiple offices in Zurich, he co-organised different workshops and exhibitions. Together with Samira Lenzin he founded the architecture practice USO based in Basel and Zurich. The practice’s interests range from small scale refurbishments, building with and within the existing, to larger territorial research projects. Currently, they teach a course at the TU Munich concerned with women architects of the 20th century.
Galaad Van Daele is an architect, editor and researcher active in Paris and Zurich. His research interests gravitate towards ambiguous spatial objects that challenge the nature-culture boundary, which he approaches by means of writing – between history, science, fiction – and photography. After some years of practice in Brussels, he teaches architectural design since 2017 at the Chair of Affective Architectures. Since 2020 he is also a doctoral candidate at the chair with a research project focusing on the Grotta Grande – a cave-like building erected in Florence in the 16th century. In parallel, he is also one of the editors of Brussels-based architecture and art magazine Accattone since 2018.
Victoria Balmer, Nathalie Reiz and Till Blaser are our student assistants.