Laura Lievevrouw is a PhD researcher at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. She works on the “Pioneering practices project” which focuses on re-reading several exceptional buildings in Flanders from the 1960s and 70s.
This research project will add to the scholarly work on the heritage in Flanders built between 1960-1980, uncovering a group of ‘pioneering practices’ which is currently a blind spot in the historiography. In Flanders, there are several buildings from the 1960s-1980s with an exceptional morphology and materialization. This research detects them as ‘pioneering buildings’ that take on a central role in the urban fabric. As the focus of the ‘pioneering practices’ behind these buildings was not on theoretisation but on experimentation, this is the defined research field. Their architectural drawings, lecture notes and communication are seen as the central agents of experimentation through which knowledge is conveyed. This research proposes the method of ‘the tools of the archive’, which combines a close reading of the buildings in relation to the re-reading and re-drawing of their design process and genealogy. This generates new insights in the built form, helping to develop preservation tools.
Laura obtained her Master’s degree at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture in 2019. In 2018, she attended the Ecole nationale superieure d’architecture et de paysage (ENSAP) in Bordeaux, France. During her studies as well as after graduation, she has worked as an architect-intern in two Brussels-based architecture offices.