Visions: The Center Keramis

The VISIONS. Architectures publiques collection arose from the wish to promote public architecture in Wallonia and Brussels by developing the connections that architecture maintains with photography and writing. It offers up an approach to the different aspects of architectural language: the eye of a photographer, the perception of a writer, the testimony of the user, the critique of a specialist, the conversation with the designers, i.e. so many entry points that are open to anyone according to his or her individual experience or preference. Since 2002 the collection has been edited at the rate of one publication a year or once every two years.

This 11th publication of the collection is dedicated to Keramis, the Center of Ceramic in La Louvière.

 

La Louvière is one of those European cities literally built by local industry: in the past a simple hamlet, it experienced astounding urban growth after the installation, in 1841, of the Faïencerie Boch (Boch pottery works). Of the 17-hectare plant, today only a 1,000-m2 workshop remains, housing three bottle ovens classified as monuments, which are both literally and figuratively at the heart of the Wallonia-Brussels Ceramics Centre, a project carried out by the Wallonia Heritage Institute.

 

 

On the strength of its humanitarian involvement with the former workers at the site, writer Daniel Adam opens this book, followed by Ludovic Recchia, who carried the ambition of the project since its beginning, doctoral candidate Charlotte Lherueux, who reviews the challenges of the architecture competition, the perspective of architecture critic Maarten Delbeke, the shrewd sketch by Jochen Gerner, and lastly, remarks by art curator BD on the work of plastic artist Jean Glibert, who enclosed the building with a broken skin.