
The Bruges Summer School of Architecture & Crafts
1st to 15th of August 2025
Application deadline⎟15th of March 2025
Applications are now closed

The Bruges Summer School is a unique place of transmission and learning, a haven for the preservation of knowledge and a centre of excellence in architecture, nourished by the crafts and knowledge of history. The participants will discover the rigour of drawing by hand using the rules of composition. They will exercise their eyes and their judgement on ancient architectural forms and discover their constructive qualities. Using the city of Bruges as a resource, they will get to observe, measure and draw its streets, buildings and constructional elements which over the centuries have made it an inspiring example of a beautiful, humane and durable place to live.
Why Bruges?
In Bruges-la-Morte, Georges Rodenbach tells the story of a grieving husband's futile pursuit through the cold streets of a ghoulish city of the memory of his deceased wife. Bruges, in its almost deathlike beauty, is not a mere setting but rather the novel’s protagonist. Rodenbach wrote: ‘Thus, in fact, this Bruges, which so appealed to us, appears almost human... It establishes an ascendancy over those who stay there’.
Since its publication at the end of the 19th century, Bruges-la-Morte has fascinated people from far beyond the borders of Belgium. The first foreign tourists set foot in a city that seemed to have emerged from the depths of time, as if the passing centuries had left no trace on its beauty of another era. People arrive in Bruges searching for the distant echo of the Middle Ages, that deceased bride swept away by the fumes of industry when the final drawbridge was pulled up on feudal Europe... From the time when swarms of English ships crossed the Channel, heavy with wool, to unload their wares in the Grote Markt, one of the most famous squares in Europe, where you could taste the spices, hear voices from across the world, set sail for any distant land... under the proud shadow of an immense belfry, the symbol of free cities.
Bruges still bears many traces of this era: the irregular layout of its streets, its gables jutting out onto the pavement, bristling with winches to hoist goods up to the eaves, its wide canals now crossed by swans, its venerable belfry that still chimes every morning, the chatter of the seagulls and the iodine-laden evening breeze, a reminder of the nearby ocean that you can feel but not see, carrying the eternal hope of vast escapades...

The teachers
Study the architecture of Bruges
