Willem Bekers

Assisting Academic Staff
Contact details and research profile

Biography

Willem Bekers (°1979) graduated as an architect in 2002 with the design for a museum in Glasgow (“The Museum of Ballistic Design or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”) and a typological research project on coastal defence works. Between 2004 and 2016, he was project architect at Import Export Architecture (Antwerp, Belgium), working on a wide variety of design projects, often with unconventional background or involving complex geometry. He was also responsible for projects by Import Export Architecture in collaboration with Marc Koehler Architects (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Plus Office Architects (Brussels, Belgium), and founded his own small-scale architectural practice in 2005.

As from 2005, he has also been teaching at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent University. His educational practice has evolved along two axes; on one hand teaching and lecturing on computational architectural design (generative design, computer-aided design, rapid prototyping), and on the other hand on the history of contemporary construction (20th century architecture, military architecture).

Research interests are (digital) heritage, the spatial dimensions of conflict and architectural design thinking. Since 2016, he is conducting a PhD research on the intersections of 20th-century military history, construction history and architectural design thinking (supervisor Ronald De Meyer). His research approaches military thinking as a paradigm for a ‘scientized’, model-based and problem-solving strategy for architectural design and construction.