With A Balloon Home, curators Peter Swinnen and Nikolaus Hirsch are dedicating an exhibition for the first time to the work of the radical but somewhat forgotten architect and educator A.J. Lode Janssens (1941). The brochure reads like an impressive CV: Janssens graduated in 1964 as an architect and urban planner from the Hoger Sint-Lucasinstituut Brussel, almost immediately founded Atelier Alpha with Willy Van Der Meeren, established the Sint-Lucas Werkgemeenschap (SLuW) in 1979, was involved with Giancarlo De Carlo’s ILAUD and was director of Sint-Lucas from 1991 to 2003. Yet he is not an established figure in the Belgian architectural canon, and he has only himself to blame for that. Janssens is not keen on the architectural world, was reluctant to publish his own work and has resolutely lived outside the spotlight for the past two decades.

This also seems to be the reason why Lode Janssens does not play the leading role in this monographic exhibition. That role is reserved for a single design: the temporary, self-designed ‘balloon house’ in Humbeek, which he lived in with his family from 1973 to 1982. The design consisted of an inflatable sphere with a diameter of 14 metres, flanked on both sides by two sloping sails. Inside the balloon, a pole structure housed the parents’ rooms, while the two sails covered the carport and the children’s modular annexe respectively. The space that was freed up under and between these structures, and which was covered by balloon foil, provided room for family life, which unfolded in close contact with the surroundings. Although the balloon house was intended to serve for ten years and then leave the building plot virtually untouched, it collapsed prematurely due to snow in January 1982.