STUDIO EXHIBITION + BAR | JANUARY 06, 2026 17:00 – 20:00
KU LEUVEN CAMPUS SINT-LUCAS BRUSSELS |
PALEIZENSTRAAT 65-67, BRUSSELS
Tutors: Arnaud Hendrickx & Richard Venlet
The 2526 edition of the Academic Design Office AVDAK (Architecture For, By, and As Art) culminates in an exhibition and a publication in which each student develops a proposal for Harald Szeemann’s unbuilt pavilion on Monte Verità.
Harald Szeemann is an influential Swiss curator, artist, and art historian who curated more than 200 exhibitions. The project takes as its point of departure Szeemann’s unrealised dream: to establish a Pavilion of Contemporary Art — or alternatively a sculpture park — on Monte Verità. By treating the legendary curator as a “virtual commissioner,” students are invited to engage with his associative method, his archival sensibility, and his relentless pursuit of artistic experiment.
The site itself, Monte Verità in Ascona, embodies a century of utopian ambition: from the “vegetable cooperative” and light-and-air huts, to sanatorium architecture, communal gardens, and Rudolf Laban’s open-air dance courses. As a stage where architectural challenges such as social utopia, utopia of seclusion, vernacular building, the therapeutic capacity of the (un)built environment, and spatial-artistic practices like performance and other radical art practices converged, it continues to offer fertile ground for architectural speculation.
Designing in dialogue with this history, the studio challenges students to imagine architectures that operate as propositions and provocations rather than solely as buildings: mental as well as physical spaces that test how a “pavilion” can trigger, embody, or stage ideas.
By combining Szeemann’s visionary practice, Monte Verità’s layered history, and the architectural imagination of a new generation, Where the Forehead Touches the Sky reactivates an unfinished dream for the 21st century.