
Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation
Freek Persyn is born in 1974 in Belgium and lives and works in Brussels. He is married to Sotiria Kornaropoulou and father of three children: Polly, Kimon and Zoé. In 1998, he co-founded the office 51N4E, a spatial design practice focused on urban and social transformation. 51N4E works on a wide range of scales, from strategy to realization, and designs the built environment with an affinity for both the physical and the invisible dimensions of space. The work of 51N4E received the most attention for its adaptive reuse projects in Central Europe and for its intense engagement with Albania. Since 2019, Freek Persyn combines his partnership at 51N4E with the professorship of Architecture and Urban Transformation at the ETH Zürich.