Simen Lambrecht

Biography

Simen Lambrecht (1993) graduated in 2017 as Master in Architecture from the KU Leuven. His master years were divided between studying in Belgium, Norway, and China. In between, he completed development projects with local communities in Guaranda, Ecuador and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From a young age he loved to explore unknown territory in the comfort of his parents’ boundaries and was always looking for the next adventure to see what he hadn’t seen before. This ideal finally led Simen to architecture. The rich history, the need to travel to understand space while allowing him to profoundly change small pieces of the world through knowledge sharing, compiled his passion during his master years in university. People are –or should be- the centre of architecture, how people move in relation to space became key to his understanding of architecture. Both architecture and photography have the capacity to capture time. This correlation drove him to explore photography through his studies and during his spare time, to capture moments of spontaneity and genuine emotion.

Interview

When did you produce your first art piece, and what was it?

I have been drawing as long as I remember, I recall drawing the cartoons my dad owned when I was small, I would take a cover of one Lucky Luke and draw him as well as I could. Once done I would immediately move to the next. I also liked to tell stories. My mom showed me a story once of when I was 5 years old. I had drawn a lion that was stuck in a cage and dinosaurs came to rescue it. At first the stories didn’t make much sense, they were done out of a pure need for creating, and my childish creativity allowed anything to happen. That changed through the years, I became more aware of what others were doing, and every story left a small piece with me to rearrange later.

You graduated as an architect but you also experimented with photography, writing and drawing. Have your studies influenced the way you developed in other disciplines? How do you see yourself in the near future?

When I finished architecture school I was not sure if this is what I wanted to be for the rest of my life, and I still don’t know for sure. There are so many interesting topics to explore. Like photography, writing and drawing. But architecture has helped me develop in many ways, during my studies I was allowed to explore my creativity. I was able to question myself and the world and think about who I was. Who I truly was. This question is one that takes a lifetime to answer but it is important to ask it sometimes. That, in essence, is what architecture did for me, it gave me time to think. Whatever I end up doing I will always be grateful that I can be an architect.

What inspired you to create your poems bundle?

While studying I tried to understand myself better. Someone once told me that writing helped her to deal with and eventually overcome some of the issues she was dealing with. So I first started writing as a sort of New Year’s Resolution on how I could understand myself more, it quickly became a ritual I would enjoy daily. And looking back at it, I could see when I was feeling stressed, happy, lonely, loved or motivated the most and why. This helped me balance my daily life more and I now understand better where some emotions come from.

How important is the drawing to understand your poem?

The drawings I made along with the poems were a challenge to capture emotion into an image. I liked the relation they had with each other. Sometimes one was more clear than the other, sometimes both were equal, and sometimes one depended on the other for its meaning.

About your photos, do you prefer to be a narrator or a protagonist of the story? Do you prefer documenting other people’s lives or create an artistic composition?

In my photos I try to tell a story. At first when I started shooting, I just shot to document, I took pictures of the models I made for school, on site trips to remember the places we studied. That quickly grew into photographing my family and friends. Without any form of story, I was just documenting the lives of people around me. After a while, when my skills and interested had grown a bit, I looked more at how I could tell a story with my photos. Photography became an interested on its own and not only a tool for my studies. Photography tells a story through emotions, it is more than ever vital and central to our lives.

What would you recommend to a young teenager with a creative mind? What helped you the most to be expressive?

I would like everyone to be entirely honest with themselves. We are part of a bigger system, in which we have to do things we might not enjoy. But the freedom we do have is best spent in a way that balances you, that gives you energy. I see too many people in unhappy situations, too afraid to admit it because they are afraid to fall. But if you fall you get back up again and continue on your way. Everyone is creative in their own way. I’ve seen masons that are more creative than designers. The only hard thing is to find the place where you fit the most.