Wallonia-Brussels Architecture Inventories # 5 2023-2026

Engaged Architecture explores how architectural professions and tools, and more broadly architectural culture, are mobilised in response to the social and environmental challenges shaping our territories—and, more broadly, Western Europe.

How can one engage as an architect? How can dominant narratives be redefined? How can architecture contribute to making society through space? How can the challenges of housing be addressed? How can the existing built environment be considered a resource, and how can the relationship between ethics and aesthetics be rethought?

Through six essays, a commissioned photographic narrative, and an analysis of thirty-seven projects that are as relevant as they are inspiring, this publication explores these questions in concrete terms. It highlights a selection of one hundred and forty spatial practices that question, experiment with, and transform our built and unbuilt environment. Combining ethics, resilience and ingenuity, these approaches testify to an architecture in action, oriented towards renewed ways of inhabiting and shaping the territory.

The Wallonie-Bruxelles Architectures Inventaires / Inventories collection offers, every three years, a portrait of architectural production in Wallonia and Brussels. It reflects the commitment of public and private stakeholders to fostering forms of architecture that are in tune with their time and contribute to improving the living environment.

Launched in 2010, the Architectures Wallonie-Bruxelles Inventaires / Inventories collection aims to provide, every three years, a portrait of contemporary architecture in Wallonia and Brussels. The series reflects the commitment of public authorities and private clients to promoting architecture that is in tune with its time and contributes to improving the living environment.

Published by the Architecture Unit of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, produced by the Institut culturel d’architecture Wallonie-Bruxelles (ICA-WB), and internationally promoted by Wallonie-Bruxelles Architectures (WBA).