T.O.P. office: Orban Space

Since founding T.O.P. (‘Turn On Planning’) office in the 1970s, Belgian architect and artist Luc Deleu (born 1944) has been working on a critical, sociological and ecological approach to urbanism. The name he has given to this approach is ‘orbanism’: an eco-centric global urbanism that has anticipated such contemporary concerns as environmental pollution, overpopulation, food production and the conflict between the individual and the community. Luc Deleu – T.O.P. office: Orban Space is an original collection of both visual and written essays on the work and practice of Deleu and T.O.P. office. It brings together an international group of artists and scholars in an effort to chart this intricate body of work, and to situate this practice within a broader historical and theoretical framework. The book proposes a conceptual topography, articulated upon seven lemmas: imitation, architecture, sculpture, mobility, scale, depiction and manifesto.