Alexander D'Hooghe

Alexander D’Hooghe is associate professor with tenure at MIT and founding partner of the Organization for Permanent Modernity, a professional firm and think tank for urbanism and architecture, with locations in Boston and Brussels. Currently, he also directs the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, focused on large-scale contemporary design problems. He has published internationally, notably with ‘the Liberal Monument’ (Princeton, Fall 2010) and with recent papers in relevant journals in Germany, Israel, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, etc. His urban designs and analyses have included sites in New York City, Shenzhen, Brussels, Ostend, The Hague, Reykjavik, South-Korea, parts of Russia, etc. With the design office, he develops durable architectures: simple artifacts able to handle complex demands and requirements.

Current ongoing projects include a masterplan for the slaughterhouse district in Brussels (including a 25,000 sq.m. market building), development prototypes for middle ring suburbs in East Coast cities (for NAIOP), a series of public facilities and town centers around Brussels, a plan for the protection and expansion of the coastline between France and the Netherlands (68km, 2009), as well as a competition-winning entry for a large landfill in South-Korea (401 sq.km, 2008). D’Hooghe obtained his Ph.D. at the Berlage Institute in 2007 with T.U. Delft, after achieving a Masters in Urban Design at the Harvard GSD in 2001, and a master in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the University of Leuven in 1996. He worked with among others Rem Koolhaas and Marcel Smets.