The biennial Architectuurboek Vlaanderen is once again a substantial volume of 330 pages, this time entitled ‘When Attitudes Take Form’. The difference from the Dutch Jaarboek is clear once more: roughly the same number of projects are highlighted in ‘profiles’ (21), but the emphasis is on twelve essays that aim to present a state of affairs. These texts mention some 30 other projects, either because they are so outlandish or because they are symptomatic of developments – in both a positive and negative sense.

Despite this discursive excess, after reading it you still do not know why the book paraphrases Harald Szeemann’s renowned exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (1969) – not to mention that a number of articles completely contradict the idea. Editor-in-chief Sofie De Caigny nevertheless attempts to explain this in her introduction. According to her, every architecture book is part of an encyclopaedic project that began with the first Architecture Yearbook. This book therefore does not stand alone. At the same time, she argues that every yearbook is a critical exercise, which she immediately translates as ‘putting certain themes on the agenda’. Moreover, the book aims to explore what ‘the appropriate rhetorical form, the research basis, the tone and the medium through which architectural criticism is practised in the book’ might be. Criticism of criticism, in other words.