“When individuals assume I’m a minimalist, I say ‘Guys, you don’t know me.’”
Sitting on the lengthy wood desk that runs alongside the aspect of his front room, missed by a cardboard work by the artist Sterling Ruby, Van Duysen will not be the extreme person that he appears in pictures. He’s energetic and heat. Carrying his signature head-to-toe black—an informal model of the usual architect’s uniform—he’s disarmingly open. He tells me, for instance, that his standard-issue baseball cap is the results of a physician’s warning that he ought to by no means go bareheaded in chilly climate with a shaved head.
However he’s blunt, too. He lays naked his irritation at how an anemic model of his fashion is now wheeled out to promote “luxurious flats” carved out of previous buildings throughout Antwerp and different European cities. These cynical shows of façadism are constructed by builders eager to money in on the aesthetics of so-called “Belgian minimalism,” the time period coined within the early 2010s to explain an aesthetic exemplified by Van Duysen and his fellow Antwerper Axel Vervoordt. They have an inclination to overlook the purpose of Van Duysen’s method and lack the subtlety of his greatest work. The surfaces are too clean, the whites too good, the blacks too flat, the storage—which is so considerable in his own residence and key to retaining the areas open—utterly absent. “I do know my work could be very inspirational, and in Belgium, we see numerous look-a-likes. It’s generally very irritating,” he says. “It’s good that I encourage others. However there may be large complexity in my method and the richness of supplies, this tactile world that’s omnipresent in my work. It displays who I’m.”
Nonetheless, he doesn’t register the competitors as something aside from a minor annoyance. “My work is extra profound. My work has extra layers,” Van Duysen says dismissively. “It’s one thing you can’t copy. Fortunately I’ve this reward, that I’m very blessed with, that inside this fashion, this tactile world, I can nonetheless shock myself, shock my shoppers.” In Van Duysen’s house, there may be little true black or white. The colours are muddied with blues, greens and browns. “A lot of the colour comes from the fabric, from using wooden, of blue stone, but in addition the objects we reside with, the crops,” he says. “I’m a giant admirer of [Mexican modernist architect] Luis Barragán—I visited most of his initiatives in Mexico—however his use of colour displays Mexican tradition and their colour reinforces his structure inside that context. Our use of colour in Belgium is completely different.”
Though his house might simply accommodate massive dinner events and house-guests galore, he claims to hardly ever entertain, and when he does it’s typically not more than a handful of mates. He describes his house as his secure haven, an island of calm, that he has little need to depart when he isn’t at work. Lots of his friends—the technology of creatives together with Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten who cemented Antwerp’s repute as a middle for style and structure within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties—have moved out to larger homes in what passes for the countryside in closely developed Flanders. However Van Duysen sees no want to depart town, particularly when his house already looks like a rustic home.
Subsequent yr, Van Duysen will flip 60. An solely youngster, he misplaced his mom final summer season. His father is rising older, though nonetheless closely concerned within the enterprise aspect of his son’s work. Van Duysen has no kids. Does he need them? Often, the architect talks a mile a minute about his work, about artwork, about books, about meditation, about his homes, about his work once more. However this query elicits a strikingly lengthy pause. “I believe I imagine in future. It was not meant to be,” he says, cradling Pablo—certainly one of three dachshunds which might be clearly dedicated to him, hovering round protectively and barking once they don’t really feel his consideration for some time. The tone of the dialog flips between gentle and heavy shortly. “It’s not that my canine are a surrogate for not having kids,” he laughs, “however they’re my little infants, even when they’re canine.”
“Additionally, I’m homosexual, which doesn’t matter now. And I’m conservative—you possibly can see this twisted type of conservatism in my work. I believe I’d have had numerous issues by way of having the ability to educate my children. If I had children, I’d need to be with them each day, and that’s not attainable. . . . But when I’m not in a relationship, who’s going to deal with me as I did my dad and mom? I’ll have my mates, and my cousins and my nieces. I’ll make my family another way.
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There’s a sense, in the best way that he talks about his relationship with a few of his shoppers, that they may even be his household, inhabiting his areas, proudly owning items of his world. Kanye West is probably essentially the most well-known and essentially the most intriguing.1 West is enamored with all the things Antwerp and is rumored to be shopping for a home in one of many metropolis’s residential neighborhoods, so it’s maybe no shock that he commissioned Van Duysen to collaborate on the home he shared along with his former spouse, Kim Kardashian, in California. When he involves Antwerp now, West usually stays in Van Duysen’s wood-lined attic area, which he as soon as described because the sexiest room he’d ever seen.
“Kanye is a genius, you already know,” says Van Duysen. “He’s an artist. He’s inspiring, a really emotional individual. He has these extremes, and we speak about that. However extra vital is the chemistry. We’re mates. We like one another. It’s not at all times straightforward to comply with him, however he will get me out of my consolation zone.” Two weeks in the past, West was right here in Van Duysen’s front room and requested for all of the furnishings to be moved out. “He’s actually into the essence of area, into sacred structure, monasteries. He was standing within the pureness of the area with the entire home windows open,” he recollects.
“I’m grateful. Being surrounded by individuals I can be taught from, nice conversations. That’s what I like essentially the most. That is what I’m.”
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