Office: BLAF Architecten | ArchDaily

psW House & Music Studio / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Piet Goddaer, also known as Ozark Henry, lives and works in the coastal region, where he experienced the most beautiful times of his youth. When he was looking for a suitable industrial building to house his new studio - ‘I need space and height’ - a for-sale farmstead caught his attention. The house with adjacent stable and shop initially charmed him because of their location by the old canal. He realized that this would be his new creative nest at the first sight of the enormous garage for agricultural vehicles at the back. A complete surprise, as that building was largely hidden from the street view.

tmEK House / BLAF Architecten

Andreas Luco — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

BLAF-architecten built a family home in Erps-Kwerps, a seemingly authentic church village in Flemish Brabant, in the Flemish outskirts of Brussels. The building plot is determined by the man-sized wall of the adjacent garden (a gelbe: a walled garden of a presbytery, a common typology in church villages); a dead-end street paved with cobblestones, designed as an extension of the village square; a wild beech hedge that separates the plot from a footpath that bends off from the plot to leave the village; and a few short-trunked apple trees that hide a banal apartment building on the other side.

House wsT / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 03:00:00 +0000

wsT House is one of the experimental houses BLAF architecten is known for in Flanders and beyond. It is part of their research to build in a different way, striving for high-performance sustainable houses that address the precise relationship between material, construction, and context. Since the introduction of energy performance standards ‘EPB’ in 2006, thermal insulation in building skins gradually got thicker, causing a shift towards light and low-cost facade cladding materials such as plaster (putz), scales, tiles, textiles, etc.

House hkZ / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 06:00:00 +0000

BLAF's interest in sustainable construction is not limited to the energy performance of buildings. What characterizes BLAF is that we continue to respond in design to the increasingly complex issues of spatial planning, sustainability, affordability, circularity, and housing. Our vision development is based on, among other things, experimenting with the basic component of our “genetic” material: the single-family house.

fmM House / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Tue, 02 May 2023 03:00:00 +0000

Architecture has an influence on nature, and nature has an influence on our architecture. Art also influences our architecture. A sculpture forms the basis of this residential volume. In our quest for buildability, affordability, circular, energy, and economic efficiency, we allow ourselves to be guided by geometric abstraction. Circle and square become form-retaining elements in masonry in volume. They form the basic structure that supports the roof.

jtB House / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 07:00:00 +0000

The geometric design and the circular way of energetically performing building that characterizes BLAF is strongly present in this house. The wall structure with a self-supporting facing brick on the outside, a light timber frame on the inside, and filled with biobased dry lime hemp without a cavity is an alternative to the traditional cavity wall.

tmSN House / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 03:00:00 +0000

A typical challenge for Belgian cities today is to make their 19th and early 20th-century urban fabric more liveable and sustainable, without driving away all economic or manufacturing activities. Most of these areas are characterized by a mix of industry and housing, high land occupation, hardening of open space, and soil pollution. Today most of the industry has moved away from these areas and the infrastructure over time has been parcelled out to small-scale private owners. “Pitting” is one of the strategies that many cities include in their urban policies for these areas, trying to avoid tabula rasa. The tmSN house does so in a radical way.

gjG House / BLAF Architecten

Paula Pintos — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 17:00:00 +0000

gjG House is one of the experimental houses BLAF architecten is known for in Flanders and beyond. It is part of their research called ‘Brick Wall City’, that addresses the precise relationship between material, construction, and the appearance of brick architecture. Since the introduction of energy performance standards ‘EPB’ in 2006, thermal insulation in building skins gradually got thicker, causing a shift towards light and low-cost facade cladding materials such as putz, scales, tiles, textiles, etc. As for brick buildings, this meant an evolution towards brick tiles glued onto buildings as ‘exterior wallpaper’. BLAF noticed in an early stage that a construction method with layers glued onto each other would lead to the impossibility to separate the materials at the end of the building’s life cycle, resulting in huge amounts of non-re-usable waste.

Passive House with Textile Skin / BLAF Architecten

Javier Gaete — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Belgium is one of the most dense, yet endlessly dispersed areas in Europe, and has come to a point where the existing models for spatial development, often based on private ownership of land, are no longer justifiable.

Zero Energy House Lokeren / BLAF Architecten

Javier Gaete — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

BLAF focuses on the generating capacity of architecture on a spatial, social and ecological level. Urbanism and preoccupation with private property have led to land being consumed to the point that Belgium is now one of the most dense and dispersed areas in Europe. BLAF have since long contributed to the general awareness of this “genetic” condition by experimenting with its most basic component: the single family house.

dnA House / BLAF Architecten

Javier Gaete — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The dnA house is located on a left over plot in the centre of Asse, at 400m from the railway station, with a direct connection to Brussels. The house also contains a home office. The cross shaped footprint is oriented towards the sun and following the natural slope on the terrain, which results in a ca 45° rotation towards the street. The ground floor level bypasses the slope in three steps.

woning boW te Wondelgem / BLAF Architecten

Javier Gaete — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Although as a model it is no longer legitimate in terms of density, land use and energy consumption, today still the suburban allotment appears everywhere. Due to the affordability and the lack of space plots keep getting smaller to the point where the added value of the detached house surrounded by narrow strips of non-space is no longer obvious. How to react as an architect when commissioned to design a house in these conditions without becoming cynical, is one of the aspects of BLAF’s research.