OUT NOW: MISANTHROPOZINE #4 'Car Tuning for Architects'
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MISANTHROPOZINE explores the outer edges and inner contradictions of architecture as both discipline and cultural practice. Each issue operates like a curated detour—assembling essays, artefacts, souvenirs, and speculative theory to probe architecture’s entanglements with other domains. We bounce back to pierce the pictures we produce, of ourselves, our projects and practices. read more

Call: TROLLING (ETC.)

MISANTHROPOZINE #4

It starts with a low hum. A purr. A glint of steel in the sun. You’re not sure if it’s a car ad or a building reveal. Doesn’t matter. The lines are blurred. The fourth issue of MISANTHROPOZINE, Car Tuning for Architects, dives into that blur, modifying cultures in which both performance and looks are altered.
We will lean into subcultures, into spoilers, body kits, neon underglow, and the language of torque and trim, and see ourselves reflected back. What if the tuning scene, with its rituals and lore, its heroes and hacks, is just architecture with better sound design?
We collected stories, travelogues and gossip, and framed buildings like modded cars. And we’re asking: are we just trailer queens too? Is our discipline a subculture we can’t see clearly from the inside? To paraphrase Vin Diesel: I ain’t got clarity, I got family.

Inside the issue:
• Architects in their Cars: 20 architects, 20 vehicles, 20 contradictions. From vintage fetishists to escapists to those who’ve handed over the keys entirely.
• A Crash Barrier Treatise by Jean Bernard Koeman
• A love story on Juliaan Lampens X Bosozoku
• Amber Meulenijzer’s Saabolina: a sound station disguised as a Saab
• A republication of Martine De Maeseneer architects, aka MDMa’s dotcom bubble office, with a freshly translated essay that still smells like Y2K
• Would You Like To Live Here? A playground by Marc Godts
• A visual essay on Hôtel Stok, the house that Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office tuned
• Aline Bouvy & Xavier Mary: a lecture-performance from the front seat of a Dodge Charger

Credits

MISANTHROPOZINE #4
'CAR TUNING FOR ARCHITECTS'
Pieterjan Ginckels, with Manou Van den Eynde, Nicolas Claessens, Amin Jegham, Pola Machinska, Aron Rösing (Eds.)
Graphic design Pieterjan Ginckels with Matis Le Texier
Printed in Belgium
255x210mm, 128pp., 2025
ISSN: 2684-4745
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Contributors: Jean Bernard Koeman, Andreas Nonneman, Cecelia Vincent, Amber Meulenijzer, Martine De Maeseneer, Marc Godts, Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office, Aline Bouvy, Xavier Mary, Ada Zielinska, Polycarbonara, Arthur Summereder, and the architects in their cars (Agus Dharsana, Amelie Brauer, Andreas Nonneman, Anna Maria Indrio, Breg Horemans, Jack Friedman, Jimenez Lai, Laura Linsi & Roland Reemaa, Leo Sixsmith, Louis Weber, Matthew Ryan Vander Ploeg, Nicolai Richter-Friis, Orin Torati, Pieterjan Ginckels, Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei, Simon Lucas, Spela Hudnik, Sven Sterken, Trey Marshall and Willem Coenen).

MISANTHROPOZINE #3

Sweatshirt designed as a Wearable Conclusion:
• To gain insight into the present relevance of selfbuilt architecture via case study “Symbiosis & Symbicle, Dome dwelling, AJ Lode Janssens, 1973-1982.”
• To test the Wearable Conclusion as a thinking tool, drawing conclusions by exploring the spatial and graphic potential of a garment and its projected contents.
• To test the Wearable Conclusion in a conference setting, expanding the notions embedded in “Symbiosis & Symbicle,” or (mental) architecture as a filter.

Lode Janssens' dome dwelling is understood as a 'project car' that, depending on your perspective (owner, co-dweller, moss, vapour, plastic, realtor) also slides into an inevitable 'trailer queen,' making its architect as a method-acting tuner. The self-imposed and self-built project as a neither (x) nor (y) performance. Do you know what Luc Binst built there, after the land was sold and the dome imploded?

Credits

MISANTHROPOZINE #3
'BUILT NOT BOUGHT'
Pieterjan Ginckels
Sweatshirt, produced on demand
2023
ISSN: 2684-4745
€70 + shipping (our shirt)
€50 + shipping (your shirt)
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Produced for the conference 'SELFBUILD X RADICALS,'' Department of Architecture, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, 6 September 2023.
SELFBUILD X RADICALS aims to gain insight into the present relevance of self-built architecture by (re)visiting and responding to Japanese and Belgian projects from the provocative 1970s, to compare and contrast these projects in the light of current architectural contexts in Belgium and Japan. Four architectural projects are introduced in a series of talks, and help establish a shared understanding of the specific contexts and complexities that led to these projects.

MISANTHROPOZINE #2

SLEEPERS/DREAMERS is a 60-hour performance, triggered by Mondial Festival, an event by SUPERSTUDIO and 9999 at Florence club Space Electronic in 1971. This festival was a pedagogic experiment, an alternative school of architecture, that saw the club transformed into an underground forest with trees, a lake, rocks, and bathed in projections and sounds. Fifty years later, we need alternative systems, spaces and experiences for school-making and sharing also. But what is there to share? And what kind of architect can we become?

How to work in your time to be in your time? The protagonists of SLEEPERS/DREAMERS lock themselves in a green-keyed primitive hut, and accelerate the coming of age of a new maker. On a landscape sprinkled with post-millennial souvenirs and SUPERLACK modules, the SLEEPERS/DREAMERS try to live for three days and two nights, live-streamed to a remote audience. During those 60 hours, they search for connections or updates of SUPERSTUDIO’s radical search for life beyond and despite of architecture and its nurturing systems. Trapped in a loop of oversaturated images, positions, beliefs and agendas, the SLEEPERS/DREAMERS must find ways to work. Crushed on the left and cuddled to death on the right by agents of self-referential orthodoxies, they lay paralyzed. Perhaps the only thing they need is sleep?

'And as our dummies doze off into voxel dreamlands, they hold tight to their screens, airing a snowflakey goo of tutorials, videos and guest appearances to you, dear onlookers. Caring for avocados, adjusting ring lights, idling to the tender voicings of old sweet ceremonies, radiating a present but dreaming beyond.'

Inside the issue:
• A protein ceremony with Mayu Takasugi
• Oana Stanescu's office windows and Common Account's marathon poems
• Tantric mediations together with Laura Linsi & Roland Reemaa
• Ogon Batto afternoon siesta for the Cowboy Continuo
• Architects' Lil Berghain, live and recorded with Nosedrip, Eimi Leggett and Studio Snowflake
• Our avatars dance to Hantrax
• Steaming primordial soup in a bathtub with Leah Wulfman

MISANTHROPOZINE #1

More than 20 international authors have contributed to the first issue. They offer a cool critique of the generic urban environments in which we, or at least our loved ones, end up. MISANTHROPOZINE #1: TANTRIC URBANISM walks you through a series of computer images made incarnate. From hip twenty-somethings to early retirees, we know the renders, with their recurring render-people, textures and symbols, that conjure up visions of a 'tantric life' in today's city. Tantric is derived from 'tantric sex', which aims at prolonging and eluding the climax. We are the actors playing a part in the ballet that planners have devised for us. With a designer soap shopping bag in hand, we arrive in our plasterboard bubble. Only the skating teenagers disturb our tantric experience.

"Now wait a minute, y'all, this work ain't for everybody" drones Matylda Krzykowski to the tune of Push It by Salt-N-Pepa, referring to the deadline culture in architecture. How absorbed you can be in a practice that has 24/7 deadlines and demands a workaholic discipline from newly graduated interns. "C'mon dears, let's go show everyone that we know how to become number one in a hot museum show. Now push it..." Offering a dogmatic 'exit route' can be taken literally: sweeping together perspectives, attitudes towards work and organisational cultures that keep architecture locked in, and by extension all sectors that rest upon hypercapitalism, digitalisation, development and repurposing.

The launch of MISANTHROPOZINE #1: TANTRIC URBANISM will be accompanied by a series of public events, in which all participants will immediately belong to a reading club, an 'in-crowd'. Readers receive the dates, locations and dress codes for the events via their journal. Order early. Don’t miss any events. What can you expect? A GLOBAL SPA LAUNCH with a collective karaoke, a reading club in bed/bath hosted by Michiel Vandevelde and Nachtlicht. Or how about a virtual recital by Leah Wulfman in-character somewhere in World of Warcraft? If you feel more like a physical event, then wait for the launches in Zurich with Svizzera Int'l or the NORMCORE HARDCORE CAPITALISM TOUR by Norman Kelley in Chicago. Closer to MISANTHROPOZINE’s home, you can register for KANAL ZOMBIES, a walk along the Brussels Kanal district led by the student collective Render(b)ender. As a participant, you will become a co-contributor to these events. Your role is ambiguous; backstage becomes frontstage.

Inside the issue:
• Masturbanizing like Diogenes and written by WAI Think Tank (Nathalie Frankowsi, Cruz Garcia)
• Maria Muskova's Post-Neo-Functional Eclectic render-bliss
• Hi-res texture packs of lo-res rendered realities
• Archi-deadline karaoke with Matylda Krzykowski
• A badly camouflaged truck trailer wedged into Leuven's palliative brick compounds
• Larry David and Svizzera 240's real estate nightmares
• Softie Michiel Vandevelde all over the (dry)wall

Credits

MISANTHROPOZINE #1
'TANTRIC URBANISM'
Pieterjan Ginckels, with Tine Holvoet, Andrew Kovacs, Cédric Libert (Eds.)
Graphic design Pieterjan Ginckels
Printed in Estonia
330x240mm, 112pp., 2020
ISSN: 2684-4745
ORDER HERE

Supported by: 30cc Leuven; Precarious Pavilions; KU Leuven Department of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas; TWITS Leuven; C.I.II.III.IV.VA Brussels; #NOBULLFASTER

Contributors: Alessandro Cugola, Andrew Kovacs, Benedicte Beldam, Jean Bernard Koeman, Kyle May, Leah Wulfman, Maria Muskova, Matylda Krzykowski, Mette Ingvartsen, Michiel Vandevelde, Nachtlicht (Demi Vanderstappen, Tom Van Genechten, Mumtaaz Viaene), Norman Kelley Olmo Peeters, Pieterjan Ginckels, RenderBender collective (Melissa Jin, Orin Torati), Stan D’Haene, Svizzera Int’l, Tania Garduno, WAI Think Tank.

Get in touch

MISANTHROPOZINE is founded by Pieterjan Ginckels and Tine Holvoet.
Published by S.P.A.M. BOOKS, distributed by Antenne Books.

All enquiries: monika@misanthropozine.com

The issues serve as research catalysts and outlets of Ginckels' research cell Radical Saturation at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture
Paleizenstraat 65-67
1030 Brussels BE
+32 2 447 19 00
pieterjan.ginckels@kuleuven.be
w/ Manou Van den Eynde
w/ Vic Winters

What is it?

MISANTHROPOZINE explores the outer edges and inner contradictions of architecture as both discipline and cultural practice. Each issue operates like a curated detour—assembling essays, artefacts, souvenirs, and speculative theory to probe architecture’s entanglements with other domains. We bounce back to pierce the pictures we produce, of ourselves, our projects and practices.

MISANTHROPOZINE is an artist book series, disguised as an academic journal that walks-and-talks. In a time when working±being means swimming or drowning at the surface - our images and screens - but also navigating between dream and doom, we look for new notions of open review, shared output, unshared authorship(*) and collective reflection. MISANTHROPOZINE wants to assemble work in such a way that its arguments bubble at the surface. This surface is a visual landscape, and exploring it means helping ferment theories and ways that collide with the problem.

Reading MISANTHROPOZINE should be a cool-critical experience in its own right:
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE is (n)either therapeutic, (n)or theoretical.
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE is academic and anti.
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE is a sticky drama performed by non-believing, surrendering proxies, transparent cherries on a puffy meta-pancake.
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE might be wrong.

Cool-critical octopi

Our issues have been made with the great energy and ideas of Ada Zielińska / Alessandro Cugola / Aline Bouvy / Amber Meulenijzer / Amin Jegham / Andrew Kovacs / Aron Rösing / Arthur Summereder / 浅川拓人 (Asakawa Takuto) / Benedicte Beldam / Bent von Bent / Cecelia Vincent / Cédric Libert / Eimi Leggett / Fake Dead Boogies / Fondazione Nada / Hantrax / Jean Bernard Koeman / Kyle May / Laura Linsi + Roland Reemaa / Leah Wulfman / Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office / 旅びとキャンパーまい (Mai Tatsumi) / Manou Van den Eynde / Marc Godts / Maria Muskova / Martine De Maeseneer architects / Matylda Krzykowski / Mette Ingvartsen / Michiel Vandevelde / Nachtlicht (Demi Vanderstappen, Tom Van Genechten, Mumtaaz Viaene) / Nicolas Claessens / Norman Kelley / Nosedrip / Oana Stănescu / Olmo Peeters / Pieterjan Ginckels / Pola Machinska / Polycarbonara / Püff / RenderBender collective (Melissa Jin, Orin Torati) / Stan D’Haene / Studio Snowflake / Sugiberry (Mayu Takasugi + Johannes Berry) / Svizzera Int’l (Alessandro Bosshard, Ani Vihervaara, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg) / Tania Garduno / WAI Think Tank (Nathalie Frankowsi, Cruz Garcia) / Tine Holvoet / Xavier Mary / Yudai Kawase / ...