A lot has been written about Flemish building culture in recent years, both at home and abroad. Autonomous Architecture in Flanders (2016); 'Poetry of the Everyday' (2017); Maatwerk - Made To Measure: Concept and Craft in Architecture from Flanders and The Netherlands (2016); and 'Normcore: Die Radikalitaet des Normalen in Flandern [Radical Normality in Flanders]' (2015) are just a few examples. Some of these publications, however, seem to merely cite anecdotal elements of a culture to make it into something that could be described as a 'style'. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to define this culture more clearly and to identify its core concepts. In what follows, I argue for the need to understand Flanders and its architecture in a broader context. Indeed, the media focus on Flanders has increasingly positioned its flourishing building culture as a unique and isolated phenomenon, related to the Flemish cultural landscape. Nothing could be further from the truth says Dirk Somers, one of the important voices in the contemporary debate, both in theory and with regard to his own practice. In this context, Somers sometimes speaks of the 'brown banana', a characterful metaphor for an architecture of mutual interest stretching from London, via Flanders, Germany and Switzerland to part of northern Italy. Here can be imagined an architecture linked by a certain continuity and belief in urban space, always on the borderline between invention and convention.
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