Gérald Ledent
Gérald Ledent is an architectural engineer who graduated from UCLouvain, Belgium, and OSU, USA. He is an associate professor at UCLouvain in Brussels, where he teaches theory as well as in various studios. He holds a PhD in architecture; his thesis, entitled Potentiels Relationnels, explores the relationships between spaces and uses in domestic space. Dr Ledent plays a co-coordination role in the Uses&Spaces research team, in which his research interests focus on the relationship in architecture between uses and spaces, housing typo-morphologies and research by design. He has extensive experience in the fields of public buildings and collective housing developments in Belgium and abroad. He is also the co-founder of KIS studio (Keep It Simple studio), which aims to avoid unnecessary complexity in order to focus on the essentials.
Olivier Masson
Olivier Masson is a civil engineer architect, with a PhD in applied sciences. He is a professor in the UCLouvain Faculty of Architecture, Architectural Engineering and Urban Planning, where he teaches architectural design, architectural history, analysis and composition of buildings and research seminars. His research domain is environmental design with special interests in the elderly and educational spaces. His works are carried out within the Uses&Spaces Research Group and the Louvain4Ageing and Louvain4Education multidisciplinary platforms.
Chloé Salembier
Chloé Salembier is an ethnologist and lecturer at UCLouvain. She teaches social sciences and co-coordinates the Uses&Spaces research team. She develops research on housing at different scales based on qualitative methodologies at the crossroads of human sciences, architecture and urban planning. These current research themes focus on precariousness, gender and the notion of commons.
Damien Vanneste
Damien Vanneste is associate professor at the Catholic University of Lille (France). He works in the research team HADéPaS (specialized in participatory research on disability and ageing). His work focuses mainly on sociological studies about the links between ageing, housing and territories. He also teaches at UCLouvain (Belgium), where he is a member of the Uses&Spaces research team. He has recently published an article in the anthology D’une ville à l’autre. La comparaison internationale en sociologie urbaine (Editions La Découverte, Paris). He has also coordinated with Sébastien Fevry the most recent issue of the journal Les Politiques sociales, whose title is ‘Art, médiation culturelle et territoires’.
Audrey Courbebaisse
Audrey Courbebaisse is an architect, doctor of architecture, graduated from the Toulouse school of architecture where she taught for 10 years as an associate lecturer. She is now an associate professor at the Uclouvain in Brussels in "Conception des Habitats. Audrey is interested in habitat, more precisely in the relationship that people have with their living space. Her work raises the question of the future of buildings and large housing estates built in the 20th century on our territories from a spatial and social point of view. She militates for a teaching dedicated to housing, both multidisciplinary and multiscalar, crossing methods, approaches and audiences. It is also developing its own housing heritage expertise structure, which offers to assist condominiums and social housing organizations in understanding and enhancing the value of their inhabited heritage.
Elodie Degavre
Elodie Degavre is an architect, teacher, and film director. She graduated from ISACF La Cambre (2006), where she taught until 2018. She then joined the "Uses & Spaces" team at UCLouvain, where she participates, through her thesis, in research in the housing area. Elodie Degavre’s practicing experience includes design and project management at Bureau Vers Plus de Bien-être : she worked there mainly on public projects. Since then, she regularly collaborates with several Brussels based architectural offices and with the Belgian review A + Architecture in Belgium. Her PhD explores the relevance of cinematographic work in research in and about architecture. Its backdrop is the relationship between cinema and the social sciences, and its topic is the Belgian experimental housing of the 1970s, seen from the angle of their design and their inhabitants experience. Based on the observation that these architectures are still in use and that most of their actors are still alive, the thesis constructs an investigation through filming and brings into existence the voice of designers and residents.
Alessandro Porotto
Alessandro Porotto, PhD is postdoctoral fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain in Brussels. His mobility postdoc project European Cities: Referential Housing Type, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, investigates the urban housing in Brussels from a morphological and typological point of view. In July 2018, he earned his PhD at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. His research focused on Interwar housing accomplishments in Vienna and Frankfurt through a comparative approach. In November 2019, he authored the book L’intelligence des formes, publishing novel documents and methodology about the Viennese and German case studies. In the Spring 2020 semester, he was visiting postdoc researcher in the Art History Department at the Emory University in Atlanta, U.S. The Scientific Exchange project Collective Housing Atlanta-Vienna: Mapping Interwar Connections examined the first American social housing initiative realized in Atlanta in the Thirties.
Anaïs Angéras
Anaïs Angéras is a researcher in social and cultural anthropology at UCLouvain (IACCHOS/LAAP).
She has been interested since 2007 in alternative forms of housing in Europe, and its corollary, the emergence of counter-cultures. In 2018, she started a PhD on "Pathways, practices, representations and reappropriations in terms of living through so-called light housing (Belgium, France)".
Participatory observation, photoethnographic practice (as a complementary descriptive tool), press analysis and participatory processes are the methodological means invested in her research work.
Her analyses combine anthropology of the inhabited space, anthropology of the sensitive, anthropology of techniques and innovations, and anthropology of the environment, combined with architecture and spatial planning, to grasp what makes the dynamics of this way of living.
In 2019, together with Gérald Ledent and Chloé Salembier, she was awarded the Ch.Leleux grant for the research project "Light but resilient housing? »
Nathanaëlle Baës-Cantillon
Nathanaëlle Baës-Cantillon is an architect, researcher and a teacher who graduated from ENSA-V, Versailles (2005). She joined uses & spaces in 2019. Her PHD research focuses on the relation between the social housing patrimony in Brussels as a leverage to enhance biodiversity in the city, through a new take on the open spaces that composes most of this housing estate. The research poses the hypothesis of a more "fertile habitat project", (1) in its capacity to create new worlds, (2) in its relationship to the very structure of soils, and (3) in its reproductive capacity, redefined on the basis of what already exists and of an increased attention to biodiversity. At the same time, she has developed a professional practice through various work experiences in London, Berlin and Brussels. Since 2013 she has co-founded grue, an architecture, urban and landscape design office based in Paris and Brussels.
Nathanaëlle Baes-Cantillon - contact
Marie-Charlotte Dalin
Marie-Charlotte Dalin is an architect graduated in France in 2011. She used to practice as urbanist and independent researcher. She has taught for five years in EAVT à Marne-la-Vallée and for two years in LOCI Bruxelles.
Her research work focus on relateing urbanism practices to social conditions and especially on how does precarity and precariat (concepts born in the sociological field) take place in the urban field.
She is newly PHD candidate at UCLouvain. Her PHD seeks to define what are the social features of temporary uses in Brussels. The research is supported by Innoviris and developed in collaboration with Perspective.brussels.
Marie-Charlotte Dalin - contact
Marta Malinverni
Marta is an architect graduated from the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio (CH) with a Master of Science in Architecture. After collaborating for a number of years with Swiss architectural offices, where she acquiredpractical expertise in the design of housing projects, since 2020 she has co-founded PLEO, an architecture design office currently based in Antwerp.
Sensitive to the communication and the valorisation of the architect’s approach and career to the general public, Marta co-initiated an ongoing project of interviews – Umbildung – which recounts the maturation ofinternationally renowned architects.
Since 2020 she is advisor for Rebel Architette, no-profit cultural project, promoting women’s work in the architecture profession.
Since September 2021 she is a member of the research group Uses & Spaces, and teaches Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Architectural Engineering and Urban Planning LOCI - UCLouvain in Brussels. Here she recently began her PhD research on the dynamics of inhabitant appropriation between designed, realised and lived spaces.
Marta Malinverni - contact