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“After the Office?” starts from a paradox: empty office spaces on one side, people in need of housing on the other. The book explores this topic by first creating an inventory of 200 office-to-housing conversions in Belgium, mapping their spatial and social realities, from private developments, student housing and senior residences to emergency housing and squats, all shown with photographs and scaled drawings. But projects are analysed also through the ways they are lived, with portraits of residents inhabiting former offices. Unbuilt projects challenge the assumptions that shape conversion today. Here, voices of people experiencing poor housing conditions offer a counterpoint, by expressing what kind of housing they aspire to. In total, 25 conversion projects and 25 portraits form a dialogue between reality and possibility.
- Contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Abdelmajid Boulaioun, Isabel Concheiro, Maïa Descamps, Gérald Ledent
- Photography by Vincent Beeckman
- Exhibition at Belgian Pavilion during the Venice Biennale 8 May – 21 November 2027
Gérald Ledent is an architecture professor at UCLouvain in Brussels. He plays a coordination role in the Uses&Spaces research team (LAB), with researches on the relationship in architecture between uses and spaces, housing typo-morphologies and research by design. Recently, Ledent published Sustainable Dwelling (PUL, 2019), Institutions & the City: The Role of Architecture (Park Books, 2022) and Brussels Housing. Atlas of Residential Building Types (Birkhäuser, 2023 and 2025).