When Royal Dutch Shell solicited proposals for a new research center in Belgium in 1985, it received the usual series of plans for lifeless concrete bunkers. Philippe Samyn, SM ’73, took a different tack. Noting the site’s sloping valley and charming beech forest, he envisioned a grouping of administrative buildings and labs connected by streets and bridges, affording views of the terrain. The design was aesthetically pleasing—and cheaper than said bunkers to build. “Before this, research buildings were considered monolithic with little concern for the environment,” Samyn says. “I created a village rather than a fortress.”
Almost 40 years later, his firm Samyn and Partners is known as a pioneer of site-specific architecture. “Not one of my projects resembles a previous one,” says Samyn, who considers himself a “morphologist” as much as a builder. “My main activity is to think about what the best shape and materials for a site are, taking into account the environment, culture, and history.”
Samyn grew up in the Belgian countryside, where his father was a mechanical engineer and his mother was a painter. With a love for both art and math, he studied structural engineering, graduating from the Free University of Brussels in 1971. He visited MIT on a backpacking trip and was immediately drawn to its focus on thinking beyond concrete. Arriving for a master’s in civil engineering, he embraced a philosophy of creative problem-solving. “The teachers would say the word ‘problem’ doesn’t exist—there are just questions. And questions have answers,” he says.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.