14
BUILDING PROJECTS
DOCKS BRUXSEL BRUSSELS
Giant pebbles in Brussels
Marking a bold new entrance for Brussels, Docks Bruxsel is a mixed-use project with a difference, creating an urban mini-district which also turned out to be a test bed for a new zinc panel. James Parker visited the project
development sitting at the north-east gateway to the country’s capital is “by no means a conventional commercial centre.” Looking around the finished scheme, the key aims of creating a strong new entry point to the city, offering a varied array of attractive buildings and routes in a new urban quarter, and blurring the lines between exterior and interior, have been fully realised.
A strong heritage
As is typical, the ability to create something of this magnitude (61,000 m2
in total
above ground, over up to five stories), has occurred in an area which as project architect Lilia Poptcheva describes it, was previously a “no-man’s land”. Despite a tram line and a major road catering for connectivity, the neighbourhood had a fairly bleak urban quality, which the new development helps to resolve by creating a great new destination.
What the area does have is a rich indus- trial heritage, which the development also harnesses to its benefit. Late 19th
century CONTRASTS
The design plays with the contrast between materials such as openwork timber cladding and three ‘pebbles’ clad in engraved zinc panels © Georges de Kinder
B
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
uilt on the site of former warehouses alongside the main Willebroeck canal in Brussels is a group of buildings which form a fascinating new landmark for the city. As well as being a new take on a major retail and leisure development, far from the traditional covered ‘mall’ approach, the €214m Docks Bruxsel is also a curvaceous showcase of various cladding materials and metal craftsmanship allied to high-tech design.
According to Brussels-based architectural practice Art & Build, the new commercial
‘utopian’ industrialist Jean-Baptiste Andre Godin had his manufacturing base casting innovative iron stoves here, but he also paid attention to workers’ needs, creating community-oriented housing on the site. The Belgian client for the Docks project is the Equilis Group, real estate subsidiary of Belgian food company Mestdagh Group, which had a strong desire to achieve resource sustainability on the site. The architects also managed to preserve two of the pre-existing buildings Godin created, the ‘Familistere’ housing building with its sociable internal gallery decks, now
ADF SEPTEMBER 2017
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