XDGA

XDGA has been awarded 2nd place in the international competition for the New Maksimir Stadium and Svetice Sports Centre in Zagreb.

Thank you to the City of Zagreb, the Croatian Government and the Zagreb Architects Association for the organization and to our engineers Bollinger + Grohmann.

XDGA has been recently taking part in major competitions for cultural developments in Poland, the most recent being the project for the new Olsztyn Puppet Theatre.

The site occupies a prominent position at the intersection of two urban fabrics: traditional urban blocks defined by buildings lining the streets and late-modernist, large-scale housing estates. The site is furthermore located at the top of a currently neglected park surrounded by a constellation of predominantly public buildings. This complex context is not regarded as a backdrop, but as the primary material of the project, as the construction of the theatre becomes an opportunity to elevate the status of the park and incorporate it into a sequence of green spaces running through the city.

The proposed building presents its main frontage to the north, which the principal pedestrian approach to the site, looking onto the tram stop and Avenue Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego, one of the main streets leading towards the city centre. Entrances are additionally provided from the north, east, and west through a lobby that acts as a passage connecting the tram stop and the Urania Hall to the east with the park to the west.

The shape of the building is inherited from the desire and ambition to group all public-facing functions on the ground floor, with the main foyer connecting both the Grand hall, located at the more private rear of the site, and the Chamber Hall, which opens directly onto the surrounding park. The facade is envisioned as a work of art and result of a co creation process with the theater team, using reclaimed materials from demolition sites, set against a rationalized load-bearing structure.

with: TŁO
image 1: Mukko
image 2: XDGA

The Bildungscampus Süd creates a new urban landscape reconnecting Heilbronn, the campus and the Neckar River. Building on the city’s historic relationship with the river, the project proposes a resilient landscape that responds to climate change, urban heat and changing water levels.
The existing park and its valuable tree canopy are largely preserved and strengthened through new planting, thus enhancing biodiversity and providing with generous shaded spaces.
Water becomes an active element of the design: a new Water Park opens the campus to the Neckar, while the River Park uses gentle topographies, wetlands and planted areas to retain rainwater and provide natural cooling.
A raised Ring Bridge forms the project’s central connective element, linking the city, campus buildings and landscape while preserving the park beneath. Along the ring, new academic and research buildings are arranged as a series of interconnected volumes, creating a dynamic mix of learning, research, events and public spaces.
Student housing, a boarding house and a new sports centre furthermore complete the campus; together, these elements create a climate-adaptive, accessible and active urban district.

with: Fabulism

Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) presents an ordinary object simultaneously as object, image and definition, questioning the terms by which an object is identified, represented and encountered.

THE INCOMPLETE PROJECT is an ongoing research project at KU Leuven / Sint Lucas Ghent & Brussels, developed in collaboration with XDGA, examining selected works by the practice through distinct questions of programme, boundary and structure. It explores how established conditions in architecture and urbanism can be questioned and thereby become the basis for alternative possibilities; how a critical proposition can reconfigure the condition from which it emerges.

Image: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. MoMA, New York
Photograph by Gautier Poupeau, 2010. Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 2.0) © Joseph Kosuth

In 2002 XDGA were requested by the Monarchy of Monaco to speculate on how the principality’s territorial waters could be exploited to offer expansion space for the increasingly congested city.
XDGA produced four separate development scenarios each borne from individual and highly specific aims and objectives. All four are however united by conceptual preoccupations and historical features such as the casino and the royal palace.

photos ©Frans Parthesius

Bibliotheka Nowa is envisioned as “The World’s Greatest Library,” bringing together two major programs (a library and a multipurpose hall) belonging to separate institutions with different timelines, funding structures, and phasing strategies.
The project takes the form of a cluster of smaller buildings linked by a shared, covered public space. This central space opens onto a sequence of courtyards and extends into the surrounding neighbourhood, thus creating a porous and accessible ground floor.
The library is distributed across several stacked levels, each dedicated to a specific program. Quiet and active functions are carefully separated to establish a balanced soundscape, while integrated voids provide connections to the outdoors and create visual and spatial links between different uses.
The Multipurpose Hall is planned for a later phase and is conceived as a highly adaptable space opening directly onto a green outdoor area. This relationship allows events and activities to extend beyond the building and into the public realm.

with: TŁO, Statyk, Cundall, PAK, Krystof Czechowicz

For its 10th anniversary, the Institute of Design and Architecture (IEA) published a book reflecting on a decade of teaching, research and architectural inquiry at ETH Zurich Department of Architecture.
It contains texts by Christian Kerez, Mike Guyer, Emanuel Christ, Patrick Heiz, An Fonteyne and Momo Kaijima, as well as 64 contributions by the professors, lecturers and guest lecturers who taught design studios during this period.

Edited by An Fonteyne, Momoyo Kaijima and Joni Kaçani.

XDGA is an invited speaker at the 2026 UIA World Congress of Architects in Barcelona, centred around the theme 'Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition'.

On 01/07/2026, XDGA will be discussing 'Regulation and Form: Designing within Systems', with Japanese architect Hiroyuki Ito.
Regulation is treated as a generative condition rather than an external constraint. Hiroyuki Ito’s engagement with seismic codes and structural rules meets XDGA’s urban-scale investigations into planning and formal systems. Together, their practices reveal how legal, structural, and territorial frameworks actively produce architectural specificity, transforming constraint into spatial clarity and disciplinary precision.

In Ksamil, a small coastal town in the south of Albania, a 7.6 km promenade mediates between the built environment and the shoreline. The design, punctuated by larger public spaces and sports and recreational infrastructures, is part of a larger strategy of waterfront developments that equally includes the towns of Orikum and Borsh, further up north.

XDGA partner Doug Allard successfully defended his Phd thesis 'Present Absence' at KU Leuven, an investigation into the ontology, representation, design methodology and generative potential of absence in architecture. The research has been carried out in direct connection with XDGA's practice.

Visiting quarries in the South of France for the façade of Les Olives School in Marseille.

Les Olives, formerly a village, is now a residential neighbourhood in north-east Marseille. Here, a new school is being planned as part of the city’s “School Plan” to modernize facilities, accommodate growing student numbers, and support urban renewal. The site currently hosts a gym, a refectory, a caretaker’s lodge and a 1960s prefabricated school building. Rather than demolishing the latter, the proposal aims at reusing it as a large covered hall and playground, offering both shelter and privacy for the nursery area. The outdated gym will furthermore not be refurbished, but will serve as an open air playground for primary school students.
The new project is designed to optimise outdoor spaces, mark the entrance to the site and allow for construction phasing without modular installations on site.
The layout consists of three volumes, each dedicated to a specific use and connected by covered, external circulation routes. The architecture ultimately features load-bearing facades in cut stone and a mixed structure combining stone, wood, metal and concrete, following the principle of ‘the right material in the right place’.

video (1): ©XDGA

Xaveer De Geyter will lead a studio at Harvard Graduate School of Design in Spring 2026.
The studio will be about imagining a large public space that is dedicated to the different religions and worldviews of a multicultural society. The project will be at once a master plan, a landscape design, and an architectural project. The intention is to create a park in the centre of Tirana (AL) that functions as a new center for public life, for cultural discourse, and for interfaith coexistence.

image (2): ©Jesus Granada

In the framework of the international competition Quartiers de demain, the project for the Résidence Ardenne of Sedan, developped in close collaboration with the municipality, the social landlord and a citizens jury, brings together the refurbishment of three housing towers and the redesign of the open spaces that surround them.

image (1): ©XDGA
image (2): ©XDGA

The second plot (Lot4) of the mixed-use project Citydox in Brussels has been completed and is fully operational.

The project superposes a programme of productive activities and housing; in between, on the first floor, an intermediate layer of parking acts as a "buffer zone" between the two.
This, asides from responding to a high groundwater table, protects residents from possible nuisances caused by the productive activities located on the ground floor, while providing both functions with a potential flexible space for future expansion.
On the "macro" scale, the project sets out a series of urban principles aimed at generating coherence between the three plots (plots 4, 5 and 6) located on this strip of land flanking the Brussels canal, while on the "micro" scale, their diversity is preserved.
The respect of the building envelopes and the position of the volumes on the plinth ensure, in fact, a harmonious relationship between the three towers facing the water, whereas the individual expression of the facades facilitates the legibility of each element of the composition.

image (1): ©Maxime Delvaux
image (2): ©Maxime Delvaux

Our project for the rehabilitation of the Brigittines housing complex in Brussels has been selected to be part of the exhibition 'Soft Power: The Brussels Way of Making the City'. The exhibition traces Belgium's journey to becoming an internationally renowned hotspot for contemporary architecture and urban planning. The show sheds light on the framework conditions that have given rise to a high-quality building culture in Brussels and encouraged a new generation of architects to participate in its urban development.

Catch us at LUCA (Luxembourg Centre for Architecture) until 06.06.2026

image (1): ©XDGA

The building permit for phase 2 and 3 of the Smart Manufacturing Campus in Genk to be submitted in June 2026.

The Smart Manufacturing Campus houses companies and institutions working in the field of smart technology. The project is conceived as a fully modular, flexible building in which the units of independent companies can be (re)arranged, expanded or reduced.
On the ground floor of the building are located all the production and storage spaces, easily reachable by heavy machinery and vehicles through a column-free inner street.
On the upper level, the offices are housed around patios that not only create outdoor -or indoor- spaces for the staff, yet allow light to enter the deep interiors of the underlying workshops.

image (1): ©Maxime Delvaux
image (2): ©XDGA

Both Citydox and Mobilis have been nominated for the 2026 ArchDaily buiding of the year award.

image (1): ©Maxime Delvaux
image (2): ©Maxime Delvaux

The Faith Park competition, organised by the National Territory Planning Agency and the Albanian Investment Corporation
with the support of the Miral Group, has offered us the opportunity to add a piece to the already astonishing landscape of the Erzen River. A place dedicated to coexistence, dialogue, integration and exchange where faith, nature and heritage intertwine in complexity and harmony.
Our proposal is based on a series of layers, composed both from qualities and challenges of the existing condition and the numerous new interventions.
The layers of this ‘multiplicity’ are structured on a common framework: a grid virtually and physically projected onto the site. The resulting checkerboard celebrates encounter and coexistence by generating conditions that allow maximum exchange and flexibility between objects, surfaces and trajectories.

image (1): ©XDGA
image (2): ©XDGA

The Regional Development Centre in Vlora (AL) is expected to be completed in may 2026.

The project rehabilitates a 25000 m² concrete derelict structure in the historic centre of the city through outside public stairs climbing up its 15 floors.

image (1): ©XDGA
image (2): ©XDGA

The Puppet Theatre in Tirana is well under construction and expected to be completed in February 2027.

The project, conceived as a pavillion in the park, is part of a larger masterplan for the Tirana Garda site, together with the National Library building and an L-shaped hotel.

image (1): ©XDGA
image (2): ©XDGA

Mobilis, our recently completed project along the Brussels canal has been awarded the 2026 Bigsee Award in the category 'Industrial buildings and workspace'.

image (1): ©XDGA
image (2): ©Maxime Delvaux

The Tweewaters residential complex in Leuven is featured in the special edition N°24 of Argentinian publication PLOT, focusing on construction details.