20 May 2021 – ‘Good Dutch architects are actually Belgian architects.’ It is a pun of the Ghent professor Paul Vermeulen who teaches at TU Delft. In Belgium, they not only play better football than in The Netherlands, but architecture is also effective, and alive and kicking. Total football and conceptualism have passed the country by.

Dirk Somers, another Belgian colleague, invited me to make a small contribution to the Belgian exhibition Composite Presence at the 17^th edition of the Venice Biennale Architettura, the high mass for international contemporary architecture. The main curator is the Lebanese architect Hashim Sarkis (Hashim Sarkis Studios), who posed the question: How will we live together? I made a picture postcard, which together with card from 45 colleagues from abroad, form an imaginary city landscape that depicts the architecture in the city of the future.

Our card is called Our Love for Boring Things, a collage in which an anonymous residential palazzo in Naples forms the backdrop for an unusual gathering of people, things and ideas. Good architects are actually Italian architects!

The Belgian exhibiton Composite Presence can be viewed until 21 November in the Giardini of Venice.