Acla is an architecture studio founded in Brussels in 2014. We design houses, cultural institutions, workplaces aand public spaces, and we accept fewer than five new commissions a year so each one can be drawn, modelled and detailed by the same hands from start to finish.
Our work is built around long material lives — concrete, lime, timber, stone — and around the conviction that a building is a slow object that must remain useful, calm and legible for at least a century.
We do not have a house style. We have a method: a long, unhurried conversation with the brief, the climate, the city block, and the people who will use the building. Drawings are made by hand before they are made on screen. Every detail is mocked up at 1:1 in the workshop before it is built.
Most of our buildings begin with a single section drawn on a single sheet of A3, returned to dozens of times over the course of the project. The plans, the structure and the budget follow from there.
“Build little, build slowly, build well.”