Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

In the 1980s, T.O.P.-office – the architecture office of Luc Deleu made six Lego constructions. Each of these structures was assembled from the Lego blocks of the previous: thus only the last construction, Obelisk, still exists as physical object. What remains from the first five is the documentation in the form of a photograph of each, where beneath is written: ‘model demolished’, or in one case ‘model destroyed’, followed by the year it occurred. The two-meter high Obelisk acquires a poetic dimension when it is presented along with the photographs of the previous constructions from out of which it was ‘born’. The Lego constructions of Luc Deleu are not models or maquettes in the literal sense. The objects are not anticipations of an eventual execution ‘for real’. They are the result of a playful exercise on the part of T.O.P.-office: a colorful, alternative approach to the architectural design process.