'Buildings have to do with survival: economic durability in space and time. Each intelligent dealing with the givens of architecture - location, context, materials, proportions, gravitation, techniques, spanning, history, economics - results in the essence of "tradition". This in turn provokes further elaboration on and rethinking of existing achievements. Each building may not be architecture, nor must it be, but each architecture is about building. Rather than focusing on design architecture above all else, architects should first busy themselves with building.' Christian Kieckens is an architect who currently teaches at several schools in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. In 1991 he won the competition for the restructuring of the Fondation pour l'Architecture, Brussels.