In that period he assimilated various influences, from the Brutalism present in the Jaoul houses of Le Corbusier to the power of the wall in the work of Louis Kahn. It was especially Kahn's tectonic approach which determined the direction of his work in the early 1960s. The Students' House of Lucien Brull in Liège and the university sports complex clearly illustrate this. His own house with studio is the first complete synthesis. Even as he was realising the large University Hospital, his magnus opus, he built a number of fascinating individual country houses in the 1960s and 1970s. The strict symmetry of the plan shows a strong Palladian influence. The restoration and renovation of the Hors-Château quarter and the Hôtel Torrentius, both in Liège, represent a milestone in the evolution of his work. As his language of forms reveals classical elements, many people consider his work to be post-modern architecture. Vandenhove's recent buildings are evidence of his control of a classical vocabulary, in which recurring building elements determine his language After his large retrospective exhibitions in Paris and Amsterdam, from 1986 Vandenhove received many large commissions in the Netherlands, mainly in the housing sector. In his projects in the 1970s he had already introduced the work of Belgian and foreign artists, both in public buildings and in his houses. Vandenhove chose an unusual location to build his house and studio. The plot used to be part of a deserted coal site and has a steep slope. The elongated cubage with a flat roof has been carefully fitted into the plot, almost a camouflage operation. It is, however, not an approach of neutrality; on the contrary, the language of forms that has been applied intends to possess the construction site powerfully. The house is oriented towards the south and the city; in the studio behind it the windows are oriented towards the north. The outside stairs to the hall of the house are flanked by brick walls; between these parallel disks a fascinating promenade to the entrance door emerges. On the hall floor we discover the stairway to the living area below. In his detailed drawing Vandenhove shows his passion for stairways, a part of the building to which he devotes all his attention. Both the exterior and interior are dark-bricked; all the ceilings are made of visible concrete. This material selection resulted in an interior with a sense of intimacy and a tempered incidence of light. The character of the massive walls is strengthened by the fact that the wooden inner doors are on top of the wall surface. It is a house that serves as a shelter, as a safe place to retire to. In 1974 Vandenhove decided to extend his house. On top of the existing house a volume was added which strongly differed from the first building stage, both in form and in material. The pitched glazed roof surface is supported by two cylinder columns. There is a clear relationship with his other work, especially with the impressive glass roof for the hall area of his University Hospital, where there is also a combination of cylinder columns and beams. A few years later part of the glass roof was closed and the façade originally manufactured in Eternit plates got a zinc covering. In the roof surface three circular skylights have been installed. Anyone who analyses the 1974 extension will find that its seeds were present in the first stage. It is a "house in the process of formation", introducing places where it is possible to enlarge existing ones. This attitude is far from the dominant notion of flexibility of the sixties. The extremity of these two poles of growing possibilities clearly reveals itself in the Casabella cover of 1969 where Vandenhove's walls were combined with a project by Archigram. Bekaert describes Vandenhove's attitude towards the extension as "synchronic plurality". It is not a matter of denying what was made before, it is a matter of applying the simultaneity of the opposites. In the early 1980s Vandenhove moved his office to the centre of Liège to Hôtel Torrentius, which he had restored himself. The old studio was equipped as a house for Prudent De Wispelaere, who had been Vandenhove's most important collaborator for more than twenty years. On the garage he added a semi-cylindrical volume, covered with zinc. The roof shape of the extension with two bedrooms for De Wispelaere's children is a reference to the large-scale Dutch housing projects. In order to obtain more light in 1963 part, the concrete ceiling was recently plastered with white marmorino. Vandenhove has always regarded his dwelling house and studio as an integral part of life, as a living organism in the making. It is not a static manifesto to be left untouched. The house is being transformed and contains among other things relationships to the development of his complete works. A dwelling house is not an abstract theoretical attitude; what has been built is embedded in the resident's life. This way of dealing with his own house is also typical of a contemporary of Vandenhove, the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. Ungers' house in Cologne, built in 1959, was adapted and extended several times. This way of dealing with what has been built was also applied by Vandenhove when he extended the Wuidar house, first realised in 1974, in 1993-1995. Here, too, there is no dissociation from the "old" work, but an intention to stress and to strengthen the simultaneity of the elements by adding the right things. It is the acceptance of a continuity, not the elimination of the dimension of time in order to freeze a certain stage. Consequently the Vandenhove house is relevant to the discussion about how to deal with buildings of the past without losing the connection with life.  < BACK Marc Dubois