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Studio Anatomy (Window) Details

Academic year 2026-2027

ADO[1] Studio Anatomy [Window] Details / Ostend – Ljubljana

Master of architecture – phase2 – autumn semester (semester 3)
Campus Ghent
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
OPO 34 design studio

Semester: Phase 2 – Autumn semester
Startweek :Week 1
Review week / sign in moment: Week 3, 5, 9, 12, evaluation (4 reviews + 1 final evaluation)
Credits: 15
Number of students: 12
Language: English
Titular and teacher: Prof.dr. arch. Jo Van Den Berghe and Assist. Prof. Ana Kreč

Head image 1: Arch. Edvard Ravnikar, Cankarjev dom Cultural and Congress Centre (1960-1983). Stone, steel and glass corners. Photograph credits to photographer Miran Kambič.

Image image 2: Arch. Gaston Eysselinck, Post Office Ostend (1947-1953). Revolving bronze and glass entrance doors. Horizontal section scale 1/1. Pencil, coloured pencils, thin black marker on millimeter paper, measured and drawn by student Eliyah Caestecker (academic year 2025-2026).

Architectural Corners through Prototypes of [Window] Details

Introduction

!! First read https://www.studio-anatomy.org/

Studio Anatomy Ostend (taught by Jo Van Den Berghe, KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture) forms a twin-studio with Studio Anatomy Ljubljana (taught by Ana Kreč, University of Ljubljana Faculty of Architecture) this academic year. The two studio environments will operate next to one another in adjacent studio spaces, generating cross-fertilization between them. They share (1) a common introduction day at the beginning of the semester, (2) shared site visits, (3) shared review days during the semester, and (4) a shared final jury/evaluation day at the end of the semester in the setting of an exhibition.

Studio Anatomy Ostend starts from a deep investigation through drawing of the Post Office in Ostend (architect Gaston Eysselinck, 1953).

Studio Anatomy Ljubljana begins with a precise investigation into the original archival drawings of the Square of the Republic and its adjacent buildings in the city centre of Ljubljana (Prof. Architect Edvard Ravnikar, 1960-1983).

After an on-campus introduction session, both Studio Anatomy Ostend and Studio Anatomy Ljubljana will visit the Post Office in Ostend together. There, an on-site tutorial by Jo Van Den Berghe will be followed by a guided tour that starts from the public space, the stylobate and façade of the building, the entrance with the revolving doors and will end in the hidden rooms, technical shafts, and attics by a tour guide.

During the semester, the students of Studio Anatomy Ostend and Studio Anatomy Ljubljana will visit the exhibition on the work of Prof. Architect Juliaan Lampens (1926-2019) in Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Sint-Martens-Latem. There, Jo Van Den Berghe, as a close collaborator of Lampens, will lead an on-site tutorial about the expressive agency of the architectural detail in the work of Juliaan Lampens and beyond, and about the specific design procedures conducted by Lampens, all in the presence of original drawings and full-scale architectural details coming from the archive of Lampens.

During the studio week in early November, both Studio Anatomy Ostend and Studio Anatomy Ljubljana will travel to Ljubljana, Slovenia, to investigate Edvard Ravnikar’s Square of the Republic (1960-1983) with its adjacent buildings in situ. The excursion will be complemented by on-site tutorials led by Ana Kreč and other local experts. Throughout the field trip, students will benefit from extensive public access to the buildings under study while living and working within the urban environment of Ljubljana. This immersive experience will further expose them to other key works by Ravnikar, including the Ferantov Garden Residential Complex (1966-75) and the Museum of Modern Art (1948), as well as the influential architectural legacy of Joze Plečnik (1872-1957), who was Ravnikar’s teacher, and other figures who shaped the city’s built environment.

For the proposed excursion to Ljubljana, Slovenia (max. duration: seven nights), students should anticipate approx. € 600 in travel & accommodation expenses.

Studio Anatomy Ostend

Phase 1: the studio will start from a deep investigation of the Post Office in Ostend (1953), designed by Architect Gaston Eysselinck (1907-1953). This investigation will be done in groups of 2 or 3 students. The Post Office will be accessible for the students on 29 and 30 September and 1 October for further measuring, drawing, photographing, … .

This investigation will entail on-site measuring and drawing architectural corners, (window) details, furniture, bronze window sections, revolving doors, … and drawing them on different scales (1/1, 1/10, …). These (full-scale) drawings will turn into full-scale models (scale 1/1) through materially extruding them from the full-scale drawings, hence presenting these details in a more intense, even palpable way. A specific focus will be put on the architectural corner—where materials, shapes, and (window) details meet—and its agency in generating the onset of a room.

Drawing on scales 1/10 and 1/1 will provide insights and knowledge about the connections between shared public spaces and the intimate measurements of the human body.

In this drawing process, other references of architectural details will be included by re-drawing them on scales 1/1 and 1/10.

The investigation of the Post Office will pay special attention to how public space and architecture physically intertwine, how the stylobate and the plinth of the building emerge from the urban space (square) to mutate into the bronze corner window (that seems to refer to Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks (Hopper 1942)), and the revolving doors that are nobly dimensioned and materialized.

Studio Anatomy Ljubljana

Phase 1: Building upon the methodological framework developed in Studio Anatomy Ostend, which will serve as the foundation for the fieldwork undertaken in Ljubljana, the studio will first begin with a precise investigation of the original archival technical drawings, photographs, and other historical sources of Republic Square and its adjacent buildings before encountering, inhabiting, and critically re-evaluating them through direct experience during the studio week in November. A specific focus will be placed on entry vestibules, window details of various depths, and corner details of the Cankarjev dom Cultural and Congress centre, Maximarket shopping centre, and the TR2/TR3 office towers (1960-1983), designed by Prof. Architect Edvard Ravnikar (1907-1993). In groups of 2-3 students, the studio will begin by examining, tracing, drawing, and redrawing Ravnikar’s iconic corners, wall junctions, façades, window niches, and entrances, analysing their spatial, material, and tectonic logic at scales of 1:1, 1:10, before translating these investigations into full-scale physical models.

Through the act of drawing and re-drawing, students will discover how seemingly minor architectural details negotiate the relationship between the scale of the city and that of the individual body. Furthermore, in Ravnikar’s architecture, materials never simply end at the corner; instead, they project into space at varying angles, shaping corners with the same expressive precision found in his drawings. For Ravnikar, the corner is never merely the junction of two facades, but a spatial threshold where architecture opens itself to the city, where a dialogue between public and private, exterior and interior, between the building and its surroundings emerges.

Phase 2: individual design process (1) starts from re-drawing corners and (window) details from the case studies on Eysselinck and Ravnikar (2) begin to mutate-through-drawing these original corners and details into the student’s individual architectural creations. The new window details and windows are meant to be prototypes (experimental)[2], however banking on the knowledge of window-making in regular architectural practice (archetypes)(wood, steel, …), of which abundant drawings and references will be available on a Google drive for the student and in the adjacent technical library of the faculty. The process starts from drawing window details on scale 1/1, out of which the student ‘gradually’ draws a window frame that becomes a room on scale 1/10, in which the student draws the next window, out of which (s)he ‘gradually’ draws the next room, and so on. By doing so, the student draws a sequence of 3 rooms that becomes a suite of rooms: the (1) Shop window + (2) Workshop + (3) The Other Room.

Phase 3: studio week, visit to Ljubljana (Square of the Republic buildings, Prof. Architect Edvard Ravnikar).

Phase 4: exhibition and jury/evaluation

Method

Drawing (verb)—mainly drawing by hand—constitutes the core of the method in this studio, and the drawing (noun) is the LOCUS of the research. The intense inhabitation of the drawing by the student is key. Technè guides the architect to fully and meaningfully confront the question: how does a culture of making (building) contribute to making (building) a culture?

Research statement

The central discourse of this studio revolves around this basic argument: a creation process in architecture is generally considered as a unidirectional process that starts with the poetic image π (see above), that subsequently is substantiated on the construction site ©.

The research of Jo Van Den Berghe (Van Den Berghe 2012, 2021) reveals that this assumed unidirectionality is false. The process of creation, which includes the substantiation, is much more negotiated, two-directional. The poetic image π is often triggered by construction practice ©.

This drawing process is aiming for dimensional precision that must encompass both the technical and emotional level. It takes emotional precision by the architect to identify what needs to be expressed, like it takes technical precision by the architect to express these emotions that are urging the drawing architect to be expressed in substance. Consequently, a further developing of technical precision may give rise to the discovery of new and unsuspected emotional precisions that otherwise might remain hidden, but which are becoming explicit through the meticulous exploration and comparison of the technical possibilities. Every cycle in this Critical Sequential Drawing (Van Den Berghe 2021) gradually brings the architect closer to identifying these emotions and their material expressions.

Timing:

Network

ADO Studio Detail operates in an international network of research and practice:

  • University of Ljubljana Faculty of Architecture: prof. Ana Kreč
  • École Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL): prof. Jo Taillieu (Atelier Tomographie)
  • Politecnico di Milano: Prof. dr. Gennaro Postiglione
  • Studio Anatomy: www. studio-anatomy.org
  • the TDC (Technical Documentation Centre of the faculty)
  • the ongoing research of Jo Van Den Berghe, and the repository of 32 years of architectural practice of JVDB (full-scale drawings of architectural details, investigation processes of architectural details, …) and related architectural practices
  • the Juliaan Lampens Foundation
  • the Edvard Ravnikar drawing archive, Ljubljana

Evaluation format

The evaluation will assess the aspects as formulated above, i.e., the process and the final production.

Criteria: see the ECTS file and competention matrix.

The output will be presented on a weekly basis by the student, and in intermediary reviews in the presence of the two groups (reviews) and evaluated.

The reviews will be peer review, up-liner review by guest critics, and academic review by both professors. There will be a final presentation with a public exhibition in the final week of the course for a jury of internal and external critics.

Specific objectives and Learning Outcomes: see ECTS Sheets.

See https://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/opleidingen/n/CQ_51522855.htm#activetab=doelstellingen and https://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/opleidingen/e/CQ_51522858.htm#activetab=doelstellingen.

References:

Ostend-Eysselinck:

 

Ljubljana-Ravnikar:

Methodology used:

  • Van Den Berghe, J. (2021). Critical Sequential Drawing: a drawing method to close the gap between the Poetic Image and Material Presence. Stoa Journal 2, Dipartimento di Architettura Università. degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, pp. 168-179.
  • Van Den Berghe, J. (2012). Theatre of Operations, or: Construction Site as Architectural Design, Ph.D Dissertation, SmallBook 2, RMIT University.
  • Many more architectural references will be distributed at the introductory session and as the course proceeds

 

[1] ADO: Academic Design Office. This is a pedagocical environment, developed at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, in which education, architectural practice and research in architecture cross fertilize and merge.

[2] The studio is a critical reflection on and an act of resistance against standardized architectural thinking. Hereby, it is the aim to push boundaries through rigorous material investigations of experimental and provocative architectural (window) details that go beyond the normative and the ‘acceptable’. Architecture should not be fenced in by the paralyzing anxiety for ‘the thermal bridge’ and its liated techno-political correctness. Architecture is Art, and as such, its freedom of speech and expression, of thought and action should remain unlimited, and definitely so in the fundamental research this studio pertains to. By doing so, this studio aims to breach the threatening stagnation of architectural practice and its risk of (self) imposed censorship that claims to be based on ‘common sense’.