Benoît. Artist in Architecture
Belgian artist Benoît van Innis (1960–2024) reached a wide audience with his countless cartoons for The New Yorker and Paris Match, but he also poured his artistic soul into his creative interventions in many national and international architecture projects. Now there is Benoît. Artist in architecture, a book that will appear in English, French and Dutch, showcasing a number of these powerful collaborations. Annelies Beck will be in conversation with Scottish writer Ali Smith, who will also read the story she wrote specially for this book, inspired by Benoît’s work at Maalbeek metro station. Authors An Fonteyne, Elke Schoonen and art historian Jan Florizoone will present the book to us.
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this programme is accessible to people with reduced mobility.
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from paper to space
Having made a name for himself with works on paper, from the late 1990s Benoît focused more on painting on canvas and aluminium panels. It was during this period that his first projects with architects took shape. Over the following two decades, Benoît contributed to countless buildings, sites and spaces designed in collaboration with architects in Belgium and beyond. For various reasons, Maalbeek metro station occupies a central place within this body of work. It is also this work that prompted Ali Smith to contribute to the book we are presenting at Passa Porta.
artist in architecture
Following Benoît’s death, An Fonteyne and Elke Schoonen took on the task of organizing and cataloguing his oeuvre, and above all of documenting the exceptional spatial body of work he created in collaboration with architects. The book Benoît. Artist in Architecture contains a visual overview of all his spatial works. Some ten projects are explored in detail through text and images. Fonteyne and Schoonen will present the book to us, together with Jan Florizoone and Ali Smith.
benoît and passa porta
Benoît has been a fixture of the Passa Porta Bookshop for many years, where a striking artwork of his occupies a prominent place. One of his drawings can also be admired in the new English-language bookshop. To mark the book launch, a larger exhibition will be on display in both shops and in the Passa Porta corridor, featuring, among other things, Benoît’s studies for the famous Maalbeek portraits.
about the authors
Established in 2017, the Chair of Affective Architectures at ETH Zurich investigates how architecture not only influences physical environments, but also (re)produces values, social relationships and world views. Through its teaching and design methods, the chair aims to develop a broad and nuanced understanding of architecture’s potency, and seeks to support students in developing a design practice that enables architecture to flourish in an interdisciplinary context.
An Fonteyne (b. 1971) is an architect. She has been Professor of Affective Architectures at ETH Zurich since 2017. She studied at Ghent University and worked at DKV Architecten (Rotterdam) and David Chipperfield Architects (London) before founding noAarchitecten in 2001 with Jitse van den Berg and Philippe Viérin. She previously taught at KU Leuven, TU Delft University and Hasselt University.
An Fonteyne regularly serves on international juries and gives lectures on architecture. In both her professional practice and academic work, she is particularly interested in exploring the potency of the architect and of architecture, with a special focus on experience-oriented design in an interdisciplinary context. She lives and works in Brussels and Zurich.
Elke Schoonen (b. 1992) is an architect and researcher from Brussels. She studied at TU Delft and KADK in Copenhagen. During and after her studies, she gained professional experience in Rotterdam and subsequently in Brussels, where she worked at noAarchitecten for several years. She joined 51N4E in 2022, her focus being on socio-spatial research in urban transformation projects. Within the Chair of Affective Architectures, she investigates interdisciplinary practices, reflecting on the potential of architecture when it dares to share its space with others.
Jan Florizoone is an art historian, author, critic, editor and documentary-maker. He writes regularly about art and architecture in newspapers and magazines. He currently teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent.
Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Gliff (2026), Glyph (2024), Companion Piece (2022), the Seasonal Quartet (2016–20), Public Library and Other Stories (2015) and How to Be Both (2014), for which she won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times. She recently won the Dublin Literary Award for Gliff and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for Summer (2020). She was born in Inverness, Scotland, and now lives in Cambridge, England.
about the moderator
Annelies Beck (b. 1973) is a writer and a journalist on the current affairs programme TerZake. She studied history in Ghent and Brazilian studies in London. She made a documentary about her great-grandfather, who lived in Glasgow during World War I. Her successful debut novel, Over het Kanaal, told the story of Belgians who fled to Scotland during World War I. In 2015 Toen de zee stil was, a philosophical picture book, was published. Toekomstkoorts is her second novel.
