Galaad Van Daele
is an architect, editor and researcher active in Paris, Zurich & Brussels. His research interests focus mainly on spatial objects challenging the boundary constructed between nature and culture. He has tackled questions of artificial topographies around the Mediterranean; of extractivism and nature politics; of images, spaces and decoration as ideological tools. More recently, he has been focusing on the possibility of writing a history of architecture that acknowledges the various layers of geological presence existing inside built spaces. Creating dialogues between architecture and philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, political theory, but also geology or biogeochemistry, and working with writing and photography as media, he outlines alternative and transversal modes of thinking about spatial productions and architectural historiographies, beyond the dissociation between the human and the terrestrial.
After several years practicing in Belgium at 51N4E, he teaches architectural design since 2017 at the Chair of Affective Architectures – Studio An Fonteyne at ETH Zurich. Since 2020 he is a doctoral candidate in that same school, with a research project focusing on the Grotta Grande – a cave-like building erected in Florence in the 16th century. In parallel, he is also one of the editors of Brussels-based architecture and art magazine Accattone. Beyond the many texts he publishes there, he also regularly writes contributions to other European publications, such as “Extractopia” and “Planetary Rights, at Last!” in Arts of the Working Class (Berlin, 2020), “Le Rocher de l’Être Suprême” in Plan Libre (Toulouse, 2021), or “Geophilia” in Habitante (Paris, 2023). As an independent researcher, he has been associated to international architecture exhibitions with projects such as Hidden Dimensions at the Lisbon Triennial in 2019, or 2038, German Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.
In 2022-23 he has been the fellow of the ‘Architecture and Landscape’ residency programme supported by the Académie des Beaux-Arts – French Academy of Fine Arts at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, where he experimented with ways of making complex architectural geohistories graspable by means of various photographic and textual formats.
@galaadvandaele
is an architect, editor and researcher active in Paris, Zurich & Brussels. His research interests focus mainly on spatial objects challenging the boundary constructed between nature and culture. He has tackled questions of artificial topographies around the Mediterranean; of extractivism and nature politics; of images, spaces and decoration as ideological tools. More recently, he has been focusing on the possibility of writing a history of architecture that acknowledges the various layers of geological presence existing inside built spaces. Creating dialogues between architecture and philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, political theory, but also geology or biogeochemistry, and working with writing and photography as media, he outlines alternative and transversal modes of thinking about spatial productions and architectural historiographies, beyond the dissociation between the human and the terrestrial.
After several years practicing in Belgium at 51N4E, he teaches architectural design since 2017 at the Chair of Affective Architectures – Studio An Fonteyne at ETH Zurich. Since 2020 he is a doctoral candidate in that same school, with a research project focusing on the Grotta Grande – a cave-like building erected in Florence in the 16th century. In parallel, he is also one of the editors of Brussels-based architecture and art magazine Accattone. Beyond the many texts he publishes there, he also regularly writes contributions to other European publications, such as “Extractopia” and “Planetary Rights, at Last!” in Arts of the Working Class (Berlin, 2020), “Le Rocher de l’Être Suprême” in Plan Libre (Toulouse, 2021), or “Geophilia” in Habitante (Paris, 2023). As an independent researcher, he has been associated to international architecture exhibitions with projects such as Hidden Dimensions at the Lisbon Triennial in 2019, or 2038, German Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.
In 2022-23 he has been the fellow of the ‘Architecture and Landscape’ residency programme supported by the Académie des Beaux-Arts – French Academy of Fine Arts at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, where he experimented with ways of making complex architectural geohistories graspable by means of various photographic and textual formats.
@galaadvandaele