Publication of Architectures Wallonie-Bruxelles Inventaires #5: Engaging architecture

How can architecture respond to the environmental, social and territorial challenges shaping our societies?

What can architecture still produce beyond buildings themselves? How can it contribute to building society, reactivating existing resources, addressing the housing crisis, or inventing new ways of inhabiting the world?

These are the questions explored in Architectures Wallonie-Bruxelles Inventaires #5 2023–2026 – Engaged architecture, the latest volume in the reference collection dedicated to architectural production in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.

Coordinated by the Institut Culturel d’Architecture Wallonie-Bruxelles (ICA-WB) and published by the Cellule architecture, the book examines an architecture that no longer merely comments on the transformations of the world, but actively participates in shaping them.

From intention to action

Following a previous volume that questioned the conditions for a regenerative architecture, Engaged architecture focuses on what is already being implemented.

Across Wallonia and Brussels, numerous practices are currently experimenting with new ways of designing, building and transforming the territory. Some work with existing structures rather than building more. Others develop new forms of cooperation, challenge prevailing housing models, or rethink the relationships between architecture, landscape and use.

Rather than presenting these initiatives as models to be replicated, the publication documents them as possible pathways for imagining the future.

A landscape of practices in motion

The publication brings together six essays, a documentary film by Karine Dana, and an in-depth analysis of thirty-seven projects completed between 2023 and 2026, selected from a wide range of realised works, research initiatives and experimental processes developed by nearly 140 designers and teams.

The book features buildings and landscape projects alongside participatory processes, applied research and spatial devices that question the very conditions under which architecture is produced.

Six perspectives on contemporary transformations

The essays that structure the publication offer multiple entry points into some of the key questions facing the discipline today:

• Getting Involved in Architecture : From Commissions to Unions - Pavel Kunysz
• Redefining Hegemonic Narratives - Stéphanie Dadour
• Connecting, Neighbouring, Cohabiting  - Maria Anita
• Addressing the Challenges of Housing - Gerald Ledent
• Capable Spaces, the Capacity of Space - Giulia Marini
• Ethics, Aesthetics, Cosmopolitics - Emeline Curien

Together, they explore the place of collective action within architectural practice, the need to renew dominant narratives of the city and the territory, contemporary forms of coexistence and neighbourliness, and the challenges posed by housing and the transformation of existing heritage.

Throughout the book, a shared conviction emerges: responses to today’s challenges do not lie in a single solution, but in a multiplicity of experiments, alliances and situated practices.

A publication extended through film

The publication also finds an echo in the film The Architecture We Are, directed by Karine Dana.

Through ten projects featured in the book, the filmmaker offers a sensitive immersion into architecture as experienced through uses, bodies and everyday practices. The film shifts the focus from the architectural object to the relationships it enables, presenting architecture as a lived, shared reality in constant interaction with those who inhabit and shape it.

International dissemination

Beyond its publication, Architectures Wallonie-Bruxelles Inventaires #5 is conceived as a tool for promoting the architectural production of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation internationally.

Over the next three years, Wallonie-Bruxelles Architectures (WBA) will ensure the international dissemination of the publication through its network of partners, cultural institutions, architecture centres, universities and professional events.

This strategy will be accompanied by a programme of international presentations and travelling exhibitions, enabling the projects, ideas and practices gathered in this edition to circulate among architects, urban planners, landscape architects and cultural actors across Europe and beyond.

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