Brasebin.Terrisse and Hermitage at the Timișoara Architecture Biennial

In September 2026, Elisabeth Terrisse de Botton and Manuel Leon Fanjul, from Hermitage, will take part in Beta – Timișoara Architecture Biennial in Romania. Their two contributions bring practices from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles into an edition dedicated to architecture as a concrete, situated and collective process. The Brussels-based collective Rotor will also be present with Entangled Matter, as part of the Biennial’s main exhibition.

Entitled In Practice – As Opposed to “In Theory”, the 6th edition of Beta brings together architects, researchers, artists and the public around projects addressing social, urban and environmental transformations. This year’s programme focuses on in situ interventions, experimentation and approaches that directly confront ideas with their implementation.

Hermitage: unlearning the classroom

With Unlearning Square, Manuel Leon Fanjul, from Hermitage, turns his attention to a familiar space: the classroom. The project revisits the archetype of the classroom organised along a single axis, with a teacher facing the students, to experiment with a less hierarchical spatial organisation.

Room B.1.05 is transformed into a walk-through indoor square, open on all four sides. A deliberately simple system—carpets, active façades and modular furniture—allows for multiple configurations and uses. The former blackboard is notably turned on its side to become a central table around which new forms of interaction can emerge.

Unlearning Square operates through targeted transformations, cuts and reinterpretations. The project draws in particular on experiments conducted by SIGMA in the late 1960s to question the relationships between space, learning and collective organisation.

The notion of “unlearning” thus becomes a spatial tool: the conventions associated with the classroom are displaced to allow other ways of gathering, working and collectively inhabiting space to emerge.

Brasebin - Terrisse : 

Brasebin Terrisse, in collaboration with Dérive, presents The Garden Lodge, an intervention that reactivates the connections between the botanical park, the former technical college and the city.

The project unfolds through a series of light-touch interventions. The park’s former ticket office is reopened and transformed into a temporary installation, while white monobloc chairs are made available to visitors throughout the botanical garden. Free to move them according to their needs and uses, visitors contribute to an evolving occupation of the park, with these movements observed throughout the Biennial.

The Garden Lodge thus invites visitors to consider the botanical garden not simply as a place to pass through, but as a garden for the city: a place to stay, meet and rest.

With the support of the WBI Culture Department.