Kersten Geers is a Belgian architect born in the mid 1970´s, the same decade from when he selected some of his main declared references of architectural works, such as those built by Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi.
Despite this temporal and formal referential universe, his work is not closed in ideological or historical dogmas or styles, and is always moving forward towards experimentalism, in constant change of directions to find form, space, scale and diverse materiality, according to specific programmatic needs and features of places.
Together with his partner, David Van Severen, he has been building an expressive and dense body of work, which constantly intersects theory and practice, teaching and design, aiming at a research path with a growing content still in expansion that informs the logic and reason of their projects.
In the beginning of the new century, Kersten Geers and David Van Severen introduced a disruptive posture in this area, drawing without numbers (digital numbers), but with deep sensitivity and extreme simplicity, they managed to keep an ostensive distance from the virtual-digital sterile world of the contemporary mainstream architecture, and bring back a radical attention to the classic, the basic geometrical form, focusing on the need to keep it rational and appropriate, never missing the ultimate point of architecture, which is to bring beauty to the world.
With this practical attitude, Kersten Geers blows out a powerful rhetoric fulfilled with in-depth architectonic message, pedagogical intent, and research goal, placing architecture in its precise and autonomous place.
In the international architectonic and cultural scene, there is no need to introduce Kersten: he won the Silver Lion in the Venice Biennial in 2010, he has taught at Harvard GSD, Columbia GSAPP, Yale school of Architecture, Lausanne EPFL and Mendrizio Academy, and has an impressive list of monographic publications in the main editions of reference.
Kersten, it is a great honor to have you lecturing in our PHD course. The floor is yours. Thank you so much.
Nuno Brandão Costa, 2021