Maat-Ontwerpers Bart Lens   Belgium   Miraculously unscathed by the industrialization that the Belgian province of Limburg underwent after coal was discovered there early in the 20th century, Hoge Kempen is an extensive land of forests and heaths that in 2006 became the country’s first –

COBE Architects Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter   Belgium   The renovation wraps up the Rue du Luxembourg axis and establishes an essential connection between city and nature. The building breaks up into smaller scale elements, each with its own logic and appearance, that culminate in the public roof garden..

COBE Architects BRUT   Belgium   The plaza is designed as a series of concentric circles which, inspired by the European Parliament’s Hemicycle, continue in the surrounding paving. The iconic roof structure of the central pavilion reflects the square and the people below...  

Belgium   Images of the project that has won the international competition, organized by the European Parliament, to renovate the Paul-Henri SPAAK Building in Brussels have been unveiled. Officially announced in July 2022, the winner is Europarc, a collective

TEd’A arquitectes   Belgium   The new church reconstructs a hillock that was located behind the second city wall of the 17th century, now disappeared. The old pit will be cleaned and emptied out to facilitate the formwork process of the future structure. The geometric halls of th

Eduardo Souto de Moura META Architectuurbureau   Belgium   Located in the heart of the old quarter of the Belgian city, the Bruges Meeting & Convention Centre presents a facade of brick columns in the reddish brown that is part of the Belgian city’s palette of colors. The building rests on a glass plinth

Dhooge & Meganck   Belgium   What Prussian howitzers did not manage to do has been achieved by fallow land. If the Great War temporarily deprived Lampernisse of its church, today’s exodus from the countryside has emptied the temple – reconstructed in the 1920s com’era – of faith

META Architectuurbureau Van Bergen Kolpa Architects   Belgium   Europe’s largest facility for urban food production has begun operations in a monumental greenhouse set on the roof of a major vegetable and fruit auction cooperative. Strict regulation of hygrothermal conditions is guaranteed through the formation o

Studio Muoto   Belgium   The new concert venue reflects the post-industrial identity of the neighborhood. Evoking warehouse architecture, it is designed as a large meccano of prefabricated structures that can be assembled, taken apart, altered, and extended...

Studio Muoto Label Architects GRAU   Belgium   The complex includes a programmatic addition of elementary school, high school, and sport center, arranged in an enfilade and connected by footbridges to form a single infrastructure that can evolve and adapt to new activities over time...

BC Architects Studio Muoto   Belgium   El garaje de aires high-tech actualiza el imaginario ideado por Cedric Price en el Fun Palace, con grandes plataformas abiertas, torres técnicas o ascensores para coches, proponiendo una oeuvre ouverte capaz de evolucionar y adaptarse a la movilidad

Studio Muoto Label Architects   Belgium   The stepped profile of the building dialogs with its two immediate realities: its north facade is a large transparent screen revealing daily activity, and the south one is broken up into terraces to adapt to the scale of the neighboring housing block

Studio Jan Vermeulen Tom Thys Architecten    Belgium   A fruit of a collaborative endeavor of the Brussels-based firms Studio Jan Vermeulen and Tom Thys Architecten, this assisted-living facility for dementia patients is located on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Kortrijk, in the province of West Fl

Barozzi Veiga   Belgium   Focused on a broad interpretation of the theme of identity, the project extends and transforms the historically significant complex of Groeninge Abbey into an arts space for site-specific temporary exhibitions and public events. The programmatic aim

NP2F   Belgium   To make the building as permeable as possible and organize the different spaces, the stairs, elevators, technical rooms, windows, and public areas are placed outside the buildings, and are interconnected by a corridor of access...

NP2F   Belgium   The objective of the refurbishment of the JIIL is to alter the image of the three office buildings in the European district, change their relationship with the street, and integrate new ways of working and producing, creating a small island within th

KAAN Architecten   Belgium   The now controversial Leopold II personally backed an ambitious urbanistic program to improve the quality of life in Belgian cities and promote a cultural awakening, and a fruit of the efforts of the Roi bâtisseur is the monumental building that went

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The new brewery for Brussels Beer Project (BBP) is located along the Brussels canal within the rapidly redeveloping industrial zone of Port Sud. The building houses the complete beer production process, but is also open to the public. It is conceived

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The new Tim Van Laere Gallery of contemporary art in Antwerp goes up in a central location within the New South district (Nieuw Zuid), an ambitious urban redevelopment plan launched by the city council in collaboration with the private developer Trip

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Sited right at the entrance to the new Mediapark in Brussels, the Maison Media Huis contains various entities related to media and broadcasting. Instead of one large building, three buildings are stacked in a pyramid formation that is immediately rec

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Tondo is a footbridge in the center of Brussels that connects the offices of the Chamber of Representatives with its recent extension, the Forum building, on the other side of the street. The bridge was explicitly designed as a spatial element rather

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   A crematorium is an important public building. It has, however, a conflicted attitude towards self-expression, torn between its technical content and its ceremonial character. To overcome this, the building is designed as a big inclined table, of whi

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This project converts a decaying building into a contemporary and durable office space without demolishing its skeleton. The existing building was stripped and then wrapped with an independent facade that serves as both an architectural element and a

1927-2022 The Belgian architect and activist passed away on 2 August, at the age of 95. Born in Brussels in 1927, Kroll studied at the Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre at a time influenced by functionalism, and this explains why, after graduating in

Sudinfo   An ephemeral installation by the French artist Daniel Buren will for a dress the high-speed station of the Belgian city of Liège, a work of Santiago Calatrava, with a play of colors. The huge undulating roof – spanning 158 meters – was built with lar

JDS, Coldefy, NL Architects, Carlo Ratti, ENSAMBLE STUDIO, UTIL cvba, and Ramboll have together won the bid to revamp the Paul-Henri SPAAK Building, main home…

The Guardian   Jennifer Rankin   Ever since he was a child, Hannes Coudenys had been annoyed by the “visual chaos” around him. On the road from home to his school in Bruges, he found a mishmash of architectural styles – haciendas, villas, farm-style houses, all mixed up with boxy ma

David Van Severen   Kersten Geers    These projects were designed between 2004 and 2019. Until now, fifteen have been built. Some of them are better known elsewhere than they are in their own neighbourhood. They have double lives – both as the main protagonist of an architectural narrat

Jean-Louis Cohen   Questioned on the appropriation of existing forms in OFFICE’s projects, Kersten Geers has affirmed in 2017: “We are interested in references, but we use them ‘lightly’.” This modest statement provides an initial orientation for the analysis of the wo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Kersten Geers and David Van Severen write like they design, with a clear line. Their interpretative transparency – both are committed to teaching –, their visual acuity and their intellectual impact make it almost redundant to comment on the work of

Albeit decimated during the Shoah and attacked on several occasions in recent times, the Jewish community of Belgium asserts its presence and importance in the country’s history by means of a small museum which in the wake of an international competi

The British partnership of Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke – in collaboration with the Belgian firm TRANS Architectuur and RE-ST – has won the bid to build an extension to Design Museum Gent (see AV Proyectos 99) that will improve circulation and the

A screen-like building, seemingly trivial but with a scale and urban position that make it a monument, has given OMA / Reiner de Graaf the victory in the contest for the new headquarters of the National Railway Company of Belgium (SNCB), beside the B

The Citröen building in Brussels, an enormous industrial complex built in 1933, will be transformed into a new branch of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The result of a competition that was held for the purpose, the design drawn up by the team

Buildings can become missiles. An example is St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, which Luther turned into a symbol of the degradation of the Catholic Church. So is the new seat of the European Council in Brussels. David Cameron came to express “imme

Architecture parlante was an invention of French architects of the Enlightenment by which buildings explained their functions through their forms, tying up the rational with the expressive. From this arose projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude

El estudio catalán RCR junto con los flamencos Coussée & Goris ha ganado el concurso de la nueva mediateca en el centro histórico de Gante, Bélgica. La propuesta consiste en un apilamiento de losas, un volumen horizontal cuya planta baja transcurre e

Situado en los antiguos muelles de Amberes, el nuevo museo de la historia de la ciudad, llamado Museum Aan de Stroom (MAS) —por encontrarse a orillas del Escalda—, forma parte de un gran proyecto de revitalización de esta degradada zona portuaria. La

Tras ganar la Academia de Música en Dilbeek (véase AV Proyectos 27), el estudio de Carlos Arroyo ha resultado vencedor de un nuevo concurso en Bélgica, en la localidad de Oostkamp (Flandes), para la realización del llamado OostCampus, un nuevo ayunta

Doce años después de haber ganado el concurso para su adjudicación (véase Arquitectura Viva 55) y con siete años de retraso sobre el plazo previsto, se ha inaugurado la estación de alta velocidad Lieja-Guillemins, última obra de Santiago Calatrava en

Después de Rotterdam, Amberes es el segundo puerto de Europa, con más de 50 kilómetros de muelles a orillas del Escalda. Con el fin de centralizar servicios administrativos dispersos, la Autoridad Portuaria belga convocó un concurso abierto al que se

Marc Dubois   For a long time, Belgium has been a blank spot on Europe’s architecture map. This region amid France and the Netherlands has produced few noteworthy projects, especially in the area of public construction. However, in Belgium – from Victor Horta to d

Dominique Pieters   Los extranjeros se sorprenden una y otra vez de la complejidad que subyace tras la supuesta sencillez holandesa. A los oriundos de los Países Bajos se les supone un carácter acogedor, una visión liberal de la sociedad, un talante progresista, un agud

Pieter Uyttenhove   R. Dudal   F. Thiry   Bruselas se considera la capital de la Unión Europea porque acoge sus principales instituciones: la Comisión, el Consejo Económico y Social, el Consejo de Regiones, además de innumerables representaciones nacionales y delegaciones privadas. El Parlam

Luis Fernández-Galiano   We would need Hergé to outline an intelligible drawing of this at once diffused and divided country, and even then we would not know if la ligne claire serves to delimit the perimeter or to trace fractures. Transferring alpine perplexities to its fla

Brussels  2012  
A+ editions   - 208 Pages