Artesis Hogeschool Antwerpen

Congruence is the state achieved by coming together, the state of agreement. The Latin congruere means to come together or agree. As an abstract term, congruence means similarity between objects. As opposed to equivalence or approximation, congruence is a relation that implies a kind of [not complete] equivalence.

The term ‘congruence principle’ may refer to any undertaking that seeks to align apparently disparate things. Specifically, in linguistics and etymology, it may refer to the principle that similar words may arise in different languages entirely independently of one another. In architecture, interior or urban design, it may be so that some similar forms appear while having some other meaning.
Thus here the Gestalt principle is coming into order. Congruent figures are exact duplicates of each other. One could be fitted over the other so that their corresponding parts coincide.

Congruence is also a state of agreement, harmony, conformity or correspondence. Can we talk about congruence as a space between theory and practice, between thinking and realization, between building statics and formal dynamics, between words and things?

In a time where the discourse is becoming very important in all design processes, how can we overlap the existing and always widening gap and give it an interesting time-space definition in the understanding of each project.