Lucile Soufflet: Common Grounds

Curated by Marie Pok, ‘Lucile Soufflet: Common Grounds’, is a solo exhibition that reflects the different facets of the Belgian designer’s work. Organised in two parts, Common Grounds presents a section dedicated to Soufflet’s work in public spaces and particularly around street furniture. This includes photographs showing the work in use and in context, videos and plans that reveal her meticulous process and investigations that occur for any public commissions. The second aspect of the exhibition is a more intimate look into the designer’s studio. Here we see the day-to-day, with samples, models, sketches, photographs and souvenir’s that are stacked and displayed around the workshop.

Lucile Soufflet studied at Ensav La Cambre, receiving an Industrial Design degree in 1998. She was a technical assistant at the Royal College of London for a year before starting her professorship at Ensav, where she has been since 2010. In April 2024, she was made a Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. London was an important inspiration in Soufflet’s work. Discovering the parks and neighbourhoods and public spaces were transformative in her design practice. Back in Belgium, she received her first public commission to design a bench in the early 2000s for the Place de la Vielle Halle aux Blés in Brussels. This became her first circular bench, which was met with much success. Throughout her career, the circular bench, in its many iterations (size, materials, design), has been one of her most beloved designs. Created in a variety of materials and forms, but always installed in a public setting that allows people a welcoming place to sit and relax, the circular bench looks outside of the traditional public infrastructure and opens up our way of thinking about public spaces and interactions. Often the benches encircle a tree, in part or in full, creating a cocoon-like space for the public. For the last two-decades, she has continued to design benches, children’s play equipment and other public street furniture for a variety of cities and locations. Some on a small scale, a small bench, for example,