LUC SCHUITEN 

"The urban landscape has a past, a present and a future that is perfectly perceptible to the attentive observer. This is what I try to show in my paintings by integrating the 4th dimension into the field of a limited 2-dimensional frame. In this way, I invite people to enter my works to better perceive the mutations underway and the real stakes of a new world to be built."

Luc Schuiten, older brother of François Schuiten, is as much an architect as a visionary visual artist. He found his place in the Solar punk movement, long before it was born. For almost 50 years, Luc Schuiten has been designing a multitude of projects, driven by a desire to live in symbiosis with the plant and bioclimatic environment. He tirelessly seeks alternative solutions to environmental degradation and to the banal, global architecture of design. Freeing himself from rigid or traditional construction lines, he tries to manage materials and techniques differently, and focuses his research on bioclimatic houses, dreaming of habitarbres - organic housing in osmosis with plants. For urban blighters, he builds vertical gardens based on the same poetic imagination. Over the years, this atypical architect has designed a multitude of projects driven by a concern for alternative lifestyles. This way of thinking has given shape to a new architecture based on a poetic vision in which invention and the relationship with nature play a key role. But it was above all in his utopian visions of futuristic architecture that he gave full rein to his creative and imaginative expression, with his proposals for cities built solely from living materials. To define these new living spaces linked to a different hierarchy of values, he coined the neologism archiborescence. As with his brother François, for whom he was the scriptwriter on children's albums and author of imaginary architectures, drawing is a tool for exploring future possibilities.

Parallel to his work as a utopian architect, as he likes to call it, he has a professional career devoted to the design of buildings - very concrete ones, characterized by great attention to the environment. For him, these two activities are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

Luc Schuiten is head of Atelier d'Architecture Schuiten sprl and President of VEGETAL CITY asbl. He is a founding member of Biomimicry Europa and ASBL Archi Human. He communicates his vision of the world through posters, lectures, books and exhibitions, for which he always designs the scenography.