‘You won’t make me happy with a museum in the Swiss mountains’, says Kelly Hendriks of the architecture office B-ILD. ‘The most exciting assignments are the ones that at first sight seem like nightmares.’ Together with a very diverse group of contemporaries, Hendriks represents a new generation that combines guts with a sense of reality and social responsibility with a sense of entrepreneurship. Their first realizations have already made quite an impression. Where do these young architects come from? And especially, what is their contribution to contemporary Belgian architecture?

11 September 2001. Two airplanes are flown into the Twin Towers in New York, bringing an end to the free-flowing 1990s. The decade that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and that seemed to demonstrate that capitalism was the ultimate solution. The decade when neoliberalism gained momentum, the Internet was accessible for everyone, and globalization stopped at no borders. The golden years of Superdutch, of François Mitterand’s Grands projets, of starchitects and city marketing. It is during this time that this new generation of architects grew up, a generation for who 9/11 would be the first political event of international significance to imprint itself on their memory.