DELVA_architecture, fiction & projection in Brussels

Delva is a place in the North of Brussels that has now disappeared. Delva is also a 400-page journey by peachlab, an architecture collective. The book documents peachlab's interventions on the site before its disappearance. Photographs, historical documents, plans, architectural drawings, essays, poems and comics tell the story of a place where memory and fiction ('fiction' understood as that which has not happened yet) are intertwined. Peachlab carried out interventions on the Delva site between 2017 and 2019. The advent of a real estate project marks the end of this space for architectural experimentation. The book presents itself as a tool to capture the site as peachlab had known it, in an effort that might recall the absurd 1:1 scale cartography of Borges' story "On exactitude of science". The spontaneous and intuitive work carried out in-situ turned out to be one part of the whole, the other one being the making of the book. The two, continually feeding back into each other, are the essence of peachlab's modus operandi. ► 400 pages ► 28x20x3,5cm ► Sewn binding opening 180º ► Inside 1 : Nautilius classic cie 115gr ► Inside 2 : Circle silk cie 135gr ► 1,4 kg ► retail price 45€ ■ english / french → a site history → a fake wanted notice → a fiction → a comic strip → a herbarium → five essays → one poem → two articles → an architectural counter-project late-entry → an introduction to Delva → a documentary → three external contributions: • Patrice Neyrinck and Marc Godts with the foreword • Adolfo Barberá del Rosal with a fragment of Uithoek • Léo Raphael with a series of fake advertisements Peachlab is an architecture collective created in 2016 by a multidisciplinary team of architects, engineers and photographers. Born from Brussels Third-Landscape, the collective establishes its practice between the extraordinary and the daily; between reality and fiction. Peachlab develops, among other things, in-situ interventions, theoretical projects, late entries for already disappeared spaces and workshops at the architecture school. Peachlab means experiment; to propose an idea upon an environment; to evolve ideas along with evolving possibilities; to exploit the diversity offered by people and places.