Brugge, Belgium

PARA Project designed a wooden, temporary, pavilion for the 2021 Brugge Triennale in Belgium that served as an event space addressing issues in urban trauma, and is one of several international commissions open within the city through late Fall.

Docked within Brugge’s peripheral and residential waterways, and roughly the same size as its neighbors, the wood-framed pavilion floats on 15 pontoons, avoiding any direct contact with the protected UNESCO Heritage city.

The visitor floats mid-block, abutting an abandoned 15thc. canal house, thereby dividing the block in two. Its proximity to the canal house is consequential in several ways. Through estrangements of orientation, material, scale, and posture, the pavilion attempts to recognize something of itself in its new neighbor. It seems both have their trauma to work through. After all, architecture is felt before it is understood.

The project is the third in a serial study of urban “strangers,” including Lott’s Storefront for Storefront (2016) and the Roche/Dinkeloo Double, at the Fine Arts Centers, Amherst (2018). Each embraces the familiar construction technique of “common framing” in partnership with their respective institutional urban concerns.

Brugge Triennale brings contemporary art and architecture to the historic core of the city of Bruges every three years in a unique setting as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Since 2015, it has been building on a series of triennials that were put together in 1968, 1971, and 1974 around visual art, and which have now become part of the public domain. Every three years, a selection of (inter)national artists and architects are invited by the artistic team to propose new temporary interventions around a theme that is based on the city.

Project: Brugge Diptych
Architects: PARA Project
Photographers: Iwan Baan, Jasper van het Groenewoud, Stijn Bollaert