Geert Bekaert has written about dozens of European architecture exhibitions in essays and reviews since the 1950s. In this conversation, he speaks about the imperatives behind some of the initiatives he was involved in during the 1960s and 1970s. Bekaert also discusses the shifts in the practice of showing architecture during the 1980s and 1990s: the sudden interest in the architecture of art institutions, the constant crisis of the Venice architecture biennale, and the rise of the monographic exhibition and of the ‘architectural installation’.

In his contribution, Geert Bekaert offers a remarkable reading of the Gillet House in Angleur. Known as an inhabitable sculpture, Bekaert re-examines the house and understands its realisation as a form of blind architecture criticism. It takes explicit aim at the very concept of a house, Bekaert argues and as such it questions the very fact of dwelling. The house does not turn its back on the accepted, recognisable housing typology. It does not ignore or destroy it but simply varies on it, sometimes in a ludicrous manner; respecting, in the guise of sculptural freedom, the strict practices of a traditional house.