Something Completely Different

Something Completely Different: Architecture in Belgium
By Christophe Van Gerrewey  
Published by the MIT Press 

Since the foundation of the country in 1830, architecture in Belgium has been an expression of the key issues of modern Western societies. In Something Completely Different, Christophe Van Gerrewey uses this small European country as a case study to describe, interpret, and criticize more universal spatial problems and behaviors. In seven wide-ranging essays, he looks at the activities of architects from the past two centuries to better understand political evolutions, social gaps, aesthetic considerations, housing and planning, transport and infrastructure, order and chaos, and culture and ecology. The result is a literary text full of surprises and discoveries, showing both the shortcomings and the merits of what architects do.

Written as a kind of anti-guidebook, Something Completely Different appropriates certain clichés about Belgium (Baudelaire famously called Belgian monuments “counterfeits of France”), eschews the pragmatism of most guidebooks in favor of meditative, essayistic prose, and finally, cunningly, reveals that all along the subject has not been Belgium at all, but rather the nature of architecture.

Christophe Van Gerrewey is a writer and critic. He is editor of the architectural journal OASE, the art journal De Witte Raaf, as well as the anthology OMA/Rem Koolhaas: A Critical Reader from Delirious New York to S,M,L,XL.

“The contradiction between Belgium’s reputation as ‘a country without architecture’ and the evident ‘success story’ of recent Belgian architecture makes the subject of Something Completely Different. Perceptively told, sometimes with irony, Van Gerrewey turns Belgium’s troubled relationship with architecture into an allegory for the architecture of our times.” 
—Adrian Forty, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History, University College London

“Christophe Van Gerrewey excels in the depiction of events and works that draw on the peculiarities of Belgium’s cultural and political history. He analyzes a number of architectural achievements as singular, radical responses to a series of exacerbated common issues in that country, weaving experiences of his own life into his narrative. Precisely researched, convincingly argued, smartly constructed, and subtly written, this is an enlightening, inspiring book, which also reads as 'something completely different' in the field of contemporary architectural writing.” 
—Françoise Fromonot, architect and critic, Professor at ENSA Paris-Belleville 

“No other territory is so well suited to Christophe Van Gerrewey’s essay writing as that to be found at the crossing of the architectural history of his native Belgium and the currents that locate it in the world. In a series of voyages across this modestly scaled yet exceedingly rich terrain, Van Gerrewey builds an image that both exploits and survives its contradictions. This Belgian echo of Boyd’s Australian Ugliness offers an incisive and yet sympathetic encounter with the last two centuries of Belgium and that for which it can be made to stand, told through architectural projects, artworks, infrastructure and literary fragments. These pages revel in the local and the specific while deftly showing how they are, really, neither, entirely.”
—Andrew Leach, Professor of Architecture, University of Sydney

Something Completely Different: Architecture in Belgium
By Christophe Van Gerrewey
Published by the MIT Press
Paperback, 39.95 USD
328 pages, 6 x 10 in, 76 color illus., 19 b&w illus.
ISBN: 9780262547512
Pub date: July 2, 2024

Learn more about the book here.