Wim Cuyvers

Hasselt, 1958. Cuyvers graduated from the Higher Institute of Architecture in Ghent in the early eighties. After his studies he worked for Preston Phillips and Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown in the United States. He then became a trainee with Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem. He continued to cooperate with this firm occasionally in the nineties. In 1984 he started up his own firm in Ghent, combining architectural briefs and participation in competitions with study assignments, including one on Sarajevo and another on rest areas on motorways. Cuyvers tries to give shape to current social conventions on the basis of a straightforward and austere architecture. In so doing he likes to make reference to the Belgian context. He does not see it as a typically historical or urban planning situation but rather as a variegated collective memory which can be made accessible, given the right architectural changes. In 1995 deSingel held the first solo exhibition of Wim Cuyvers' work.
He has taught at the architectural academies of Tilburg and Eindhoven in the Netherlands and at St Luke's College in Ghent. In 2000 he moved to the Jura region in France. He currently works as an advisory researcher for the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.