Luc Deleu

Since founding the 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 that he has named “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. Orban Space traces Deleu’s work and practice through a conceptual topography defined by seven terms: architecture, syncretism, depiction, sculpture, scale, mobility and manifesto. This book presents a biographical portrait of Luc Deleu and T.O.P. Office and situates them within a broader historical and theoretical framework, where they emerge from the lineage defined by such idiosyncratic utopian visionaries as the Metabolists, Buckminster Fuller, Superstudio, Yona Friedman and Constant Nieuwenhuis.