Brussels Housing (PDF)

Gérald Ledent is an architecture professor at UCLouvain in Brussels, where he teaches theory as well as in various studios. His PhD thesis, "Potentiels Relationnels", explores the relations in dwelling between spaces and uses illustrated by an atlas of more than 10,000 housing units in Brussels. Ledent plays a coordination role in the Uses&Spaces research team, in which his interests focus on the relationship in architecture between uses and spaces, housing typo-morphologies, and research by design. Recently, Ledent co-edited Sustainable Dwelling (Brussels, PUL - PU Louvain, 2019), a book that examines the social and spatial dimensions of housing from a sustainability perspective. He is also the author of Institutions & the City: The Role of Architecture (Zürich, Park Books, 2022), which explores the role of architecture in establishing and perpetuating social structures and ideologies. Ledent has extensive experience as a practitioner in the fields of public buildings and collective housing developments in Belgium and abroad. He is the co-founder of the architectural practice KIS studio (Keep It Simple studio), which aims to avoid unnecessary complexity in order to focus on the essentials.

Alessandro Porotto is a postdoctoral researcher in the Uses&Spaces research group at UCLouvain, Brussels, and in the Architecture and the City research group at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. His research interests focus on the typological and historical evolution, as well as new forms, of urban housing and urban blocks in various cities. He is an architect who graduated from Politecnico di Torino, Italy (2012) and holds a PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland (2018) with a dissertation investigating the interwar housing typologies in Vienna and Frankfurt am Main. He was a visiting researcher at the Art History Department of Emory University, USA, to study the architectural design of