Wouter Van Acker

Wouter Van Acker is engineer-architect and associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he co-directs Hortence, ULB’s research centre for architectural history, theory and criticism. Before he was lecturer at Griffith University and doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University. He teaches Bachelor's courses on art and architectural theory, and the Master's design studio Umbau on adaptive reuse.

His research focus is the history, theory and preservation of late-modern and post-modern architecture. He is currently coordinating (with M. Liefooghe) a research project on the integration of contemporary architecture in historical cities in the 1970s and 1980s in Belgium.

Before he has worked on problem of anti-aesthetics, intermediality and untimeliness, as well as the architecture of knowledge. His PhD dissertation (Ghent University, 2011) explored the architecture of knowledge in the work of Paul Otlet (1868-1944), Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and Otto Neurath (1882-1945). He has co-edited several books and journal issues, such as a special issue "Untimely Teachers" for Architectural Theory Review, the issue on "Intermediality" for the journal Clara, a book on the Ghent Universal Exhibition of 1913, a book on the transnational history of the UIA (Bloomsbury, 2019), and on Architecture and Ugliness (Bloomsbury, 2020).