“Our buildings tend to appear very simple, which is both a winning and a losing factor in competitions,” laughs architect Kersten Geers, founding partner, alongside David Van Severen, of Brussels-based OFFICE KGDVS, a 2009 RECORD Design Vanguard. “When we lose, the judges say, ‘We don’t trust you. A figure that simple cannot settle all the issues.’ And when we win, they say, ‘This is weird—you wouldn’t think a figure that simple could resolve all the problems!’” Among the basic shapes OFFICE uses to compose its plans, quadrilaterals loom large, but circles also appear from time to time, often enclosing a square. An inversion of the classic motif of a circle inside a square—found, for example, in Palladio’s Villa La Rotunda, Hardouin-Mansart’s Dôme des Invalides, or Louis Kahn’s National Assembly of Bangladesh—this combination first entered OFFICE’s repertoire in its 2006 competition proposal for an annex to Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library: in response to the Swede’s Palladian drum-on-a-box, OFFICE imagined a cylinder enclosing a square courtyard. In 2017, the firm returned to this motif, albeit at a far more modest scale, when competing to build the village library at Sint-Martens-Latem in Flanders.