Architect: Marie-José Van Hee

Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing

Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing

Tessa Baird

‘House’ by Marie-José Van Hee is drawn on a sheet of trace, the edge of which is visible at the top, offset from the plain white ground for photographing or scanning. It is a freehand drawing that uses black graphite for lines, to hatch, shade, and achieve gradations of roughly rendered… Read More

Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer

Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer

Marie-José Van Hee

Towards the end of my architectural studies in the late 1960s I moved into a little house near the Prinsenhof neighbourhood of Ghent. My neighbours were Ghent people, and my landlord owned the whole block. Every month he would collect rent, and although he didn’t talk to most people, he… Read More

Mystery as Ground

Mystery as Ground

Andrew Clancy

I We could start here, with this image in the exhibition Disappear Here, found in Abraham Bosse’s (c. 1602–1676) Maniere universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective. Two men stand looking at a four-sided form projected on the ground. Rather than an orthogonal, universal perspective that privileges one point outside the picture,… Read More

Alternative Histories: Marie-José Van Hee on Hans Hollein

Alternative Histories: Marie-José Van Hee on Hans Hollein

The construction and layering in Hans Hollein’s drawing reminds me of the Aqueduc Romain de Barbegal in France, which I visited some summers ago. This structure can be found in Hollein’s drawing of the city; for me, it represents a landscape, rather than an urban context.  The drawing comprises three layers.… Read More

Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings

Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings

Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More

The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee

The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee

Helen Thomas

Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More