Beyond The Pavilion - Portraits of Architects: Laurent Ney

The documentary Beyond the Pavilion, directed by Mister Emma, offers an in-depth reading of Walloon architectural practices through the lens of national pavilions designed for world expos. Following the trajectories of five architects active on the international stage, the film highlights strong architectural visions where sustainability, structural innovation and cultural expression intersect.

By focusing on these key figures, Beyond the Pavilion examines how the pavilion—an inherently ephemeral object—becomes a concentration of complex issues: tight timeframes, dismantlability, territorial storytelling, environmental responsibility and interdisciplinary collaboration. This episode is dedicated to engineer and structural designer Laurent Ney.

Laurent Ney: engineering as a project culture

A civil engineer, Laurent Ney is the co-founder of Ney & Partners, an office internationally recognised for its expertise in the design of lightweight, innovative and sustainable architectural structures. At the intersection of art and engineering, his work is characterised by the ability to translate ambitious architectural intentions into rigorous, sensitive and deeply contextualised structural systems.

His career is marked by projects that have become references in their own right. From the Spoor Noord footbridge, conceived as a poetic transition between city and nature, to emblematic works such as the Knokke footbridge or the Tintagel Bridge, Laurent Ney consistently advocates a non-formalist approach. Each project emerges from a precise analysis of its constraints—whether physical, cultural, historical or procedural. The aim is not to develop a signature style, but to formulate coherent responses to singular situations.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

For Laurent Ney, simplicity is the result of a process of refinement and of a recurring question: what is truly necessary? What can be removed ultimately strengthens the project. 

Elegance is never an objective in itself, but rather the outcome of a demanding process. This deliberate restraint opens up multiple layers of reading: the perception of the distant landscape, the bodily experience of moving across the structure, and the direct contact with materiality.

The Luxembourg Pavilion in Osaka

The pavilion exercise introduces an additional constraint: short timeframes and ephemerality.

For the Luxembourg Pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka, designed with SteinmetzDeMeyer architectes, the scenographers Jangled Nerves, Betic, and Ney & Partners, Laurent Ney opted for existing industrial systems: concrete formwork panels, steel columns and standard Japanese materials, all intended to be reused after the event.

Entitled Doki-Doki Lu—“heartbeat” in Japanese—the project is composed of a set of volumes unified by a monumental tensile membrane, visible from afar and animated by light at night.

Both protective envelope and unifying gesture, this membrane was dismantled at the end of the exhibition. The pavilion’s dimensions, based on tatami modules, reflect a careful attention to cultural context and to circular economy principles, which lie at the core of the message conveyed by Luxembourg.