Find myself a city to live in

‘We want to value the ordinary, and to such an extent that it is no longer regarded as banal’, say Henk De Smet and Paul Vermeulen. The projects they have been working on since establishing their office in the late 1980s illustrate this attitude: compositions and structures in which ordinary elements acquire new meaning, and architecture that is at the service of the public space.

Urban development from the bottom up
De Smet and Vermeulen deliberately choose to work in a broad field, one that also includes urban design and advisory studies. They view the architectural project as ‘urban development from the bottom up’. In this vein, they designed and built the offices of the Flanders Environment Agency in Aalst, a model project for urban renewal and sustainable building that won the Belgian Building Award and the Client Award (2005). In Antwerp, they were involved in the Intergenerational Housing on the Left Bank project (Intergenerationeel Wonen LinkerOever, IGLO for which they designed, as architects, a crèche and residential care centre.