David Van Severen: who is the award-winning Belgian architect

David Van Severen (born 1978 in Ghent) studied at the University of Ghent and at ETSA in Madrid, Spain. In 2002, he founded OFFICE in Brussels together with Kersten Geers.

OFFICE has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Belgian Prize for Architecture, the Silver Lion at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Since its foundation, OFFICE has been committed to the idea of ​​architecture as a cultural enterprise aimed at improving the human environment.

To this end, it increasingly sees the issues of sustainability and responsible sourcing as a catalyst for shaping our urban and social reality, and architectural form as part of the solution.

OFFICE is a collaborative studio, bringing together architects, developers and experts from various disciplines to ensure the quality of each project. The projects are both pragmatic and innovative, yet deeply rooted in different architectural histories.

OFFICE projects vary in scale and typology, from furniture to urban design. Recent projects underway include the Aerospacelab megafactory in Charleroi, Belgium, the Swiss Radio and Television building in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the VRT headquarters in Brussels.

This practice is combined with academic research and teaching, creating unexpected parallels between the two aspects of OFFICE's output.

Kersten Geers and David Van Severen are joint Design Critics in Architecture at the Harvard GSD; Geers is also a full professor at the USI Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio.

Previously, they taught at various institutions, including the Berlage Institute, TU Delft, Ghent University, Columbia University GSAPP, Yale School of Architecture and EPF Lausanne. This academic production is documented under the name Office Without Office. Since 2018, OFFICE has been a partnership led by Kersten Geers, David Van Severen and Jan Lenaerts, together with associates Justine Rossillion, Alexander Smedts and Jacopo Lugli.