A Register of Wording

Martine De Maeseneer and Dirk Van den Brande, principals of Brussels-based practice Martine De Maeseneer Architects (MDMA), are “not compulsive builders.” From the outset in 1988, they have advanced an architecture self-consciously embedded in text, oscillating between theorisation and realisation. In their award-winning built and conceptual work, MDMA’s interest is in spatial organisations that initiate nonlinear stories and shift identities.

The first of two intended volumes—the second one to present MDMA’s design work— A Register of Wording assembles the practice’s text-based production to show how writing establishes a fertile—if unstable—ground for design. The book is more than a representation of words: it unfolds thinking expansively, across pages and decades, meandering yet distinctively committed to the search for a wide field of motives and plots for architecture.

It offers previously published essays conjuring the energy of the 1990s and early 2000s alongside unpublished explorations that extend, recast, and complexify earlier lines of thinking. Departing from an early analysis of existing buildings, MDMA’s texts become more autonomous over time, invoking an unexpected array of visual, creative, and philosophical references. Sources are sampled, interrogated, circled around, juxtaposed, elided, played with. Pieces developed as lectures seize the theme, time, and place of the invitation to provide a distinctive perspective, without shying away from provocation.