ABSTRACT
A country without architecture, indeed, and in a paradoxical way Bekaert, the central Belgian architecture historian, has not disputed this absence by constructing other national narratives or art historical threads. His writing on the architectural history of a country that has never had any architecture to speak of, consists exactly in making this absence of architecture universal. This means that in Belgium the experience of architecture, in the rare cases in which it occurs, is not distorted by cultural mechanisms, national divides or art historical categorizations. All the general and existential circumstances to aord the experience of architecture rsthand, are present. Everything that could prevent us from gaining access to what architecture is really about, remains absent.
