An Fonteyne (1971) is an architect and professor of architectural design.
She grew up in Ostend (Belgium) and graduated as an architect at Ghent University in 1994. She worked at DKV architecten in Rotterdam and David Chipperfield architects in London.
In 2000 she founded noAarchitecten together with Jitse van den Berg and Philippe Viérin. Their work is based on a strong confidence in the future of urban society. They do not see architecture as a discipline that is practised in isolation, but as a continuous conversation that they like to have with other critical thinkers from various disciplines. As a team of about twenty people, noAarchitecten is working on a rich oeuvre of very diverse buildings, including public institutions, housing and transformations of historical buildings. Their work arises in a strong connection with the layered history of building, but at the same time focuses on the contemporary conditions of living together.
Since 2017, An Fonteyne has also been a partner at Atelier Kanal, the architecture collective that was founded between noAarchitecten, EM2N (Zurich) and Sergison Bates (London) for the transformation of the former Citroen garage into Kanal, a museum and workshop for modern and contemporary art, performance and architecture in Brussels.
Since 2019 An Fonteyne is an elected member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. An Fonteyne is Professor of Architecture and Design at ETH Zurich since 2017. Previously, she was a lecturer at TU Delft and a professor at Hasselt University. An Fonteyne lives and works in Brussels and Zurich and has two children.
Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk is an architectural designer and researcher from Johannesburg who operates with a focus on practicing intersectionality. She is the founder of Matri-Archi(tecture), a collective based between South Africa and Switzerland that aims at empowering African women as a network dedicated to African spatial education. Her individual practice focuses on typologies of safe space with aims at reducing gender-based violence in cities.
She was educated at the University of Cambridge where she graduated with an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (RIBA II). Prior to this she was educated at the University of Cape Town where she graduated with a postgraduate honours degree in City Planning and a bachelors degree in Architectural Studies. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Khensani finds educational value in spatial, written and auditory explorations. She is a collaborator of studio 8FOLD in London, she hosts a podcast called KONTEXT and serves as an editorial contributor at the Architectural Review in London.
Ties Linders studied at TU Eindhoven and ETH Zürich. After graduating in 2010 at the Studio of Christian Rapp, he worked at several offices in the Netherlands and in Zürich, among which Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven architecten and Mathis Kamplade, where he delivered a house in Wollishofen and was involved in several competitions. Since graduation he also worked on his own projects in Eindhoven, Amsterdam and Zürich, ranging from small extensions to competitions.
Els Silvrants-Barclay is a curator, researcher and activist. She is associate researcher at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies, and coordinator of Permanent, a practice-based research project that draws upon anti-speculative models from the commons- and cooperative economy and proposes spatial typologies of difference to develop an infrastructure for a multitude of uses and users to ‘be in it together without needing to be the same’. She regularly works as a curator for public art commissions. Her practice is centered on the politics of spatial production, looking at space as affective, as choreography of bodies, as reflective and reproductive of worldviews, and assembles around the question on how to think and produce space otherwise.
Till 2019 she directed the contemporary arts center Netwerk Aalst. Previously she led a collaboration between four contemporary art museums in Belgium. She coordinated the Advanced Master in Theatre Studies, lectured dance theory and was part of the Research Centre for Visual Poetics at the University of Antwerp. Before she lived in Beijing where she co-founded the Institute for Provocation, a workspace for artists and architects.
Galaad Van Daele studied at ENSAPLV—Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette (from which he graduated in 2014) and TU Berlin. He then earned a postmaster’s degree in architectural research at ENSAPLV in 2016 with a dissertation entitled The Landscape as Battlefield, with which he initiated an ongoing research trajectory focusing on the idea of space as an aesthetical construct under iconographic influence, mixing theory with visual practice.
From 2014 to 2018, he collaborated with 51N4E architects in Brussels on urban and architectural projects, and led the development of several exhibitions and publications presenting the work of the office in an international context. Since 2018 he works independently on a range of competitions, exhibitions, editorial and research projects. In 2019, he became one of the editors of architecture and art magazine Accattone.
Camiel Van Noten graduated as an architect at Asro KU Leuven in 2012. After working in Paris for two years, Camiel joined Sergison Bates architects. In 2014. In 2018 he co-founded the Zurich based office Solanellas Van Noten Meister Architekten. In addition to his experience as a practicing architect, Camiel has led a master studio at Kingston School of Arts in London and has organised two workshops at the University of Antwerp. Camiel regularly contributes to academic discourse as a visiting critic at numerous institutions including the London Metropolitan University, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, ETH Zurich, and the KULeuven.
Andrea Giger is our research assistant till the end of 2023.
Konrad Kramer, Silvie Frei, Nina Hsu and Martina Hügli are our student assistants.