BELGIUM 069 Left The Westkaai
residential towers in Antwerp, featuring the work of three different architectural practices all in a row
Right A new building in the historically significant Frederiksstaden district of central Copenhagen, which completes the classical square of apartments around the Marble Church
Below Fuglsang
Kunstmuseum is a purpose built regional art museum designed by Tony Fretton Architects to house the Storstrøm Art Museum’s permanent collection of Danish fine art
‘[Antwerp] has been one of the continent’s essential trade hubs, as well as a prolific incubator of the avant-garde’
For a city whose culture has depended on trade since its inception, on an openness to whatever innovation comes through its docks, the burden of tradition is less stifling in Antwerp than it might be for young artists in less changeable cities. It is unexpectedly both Europe’s second busiest seaport and located 50 miles inland from the sea. For much of the past half millennium, its character has been defined by this geographical quirk. Sheltered in a nook of the
Scheldt estuary, it is at once quintessentially European – a city of medieval cobblestone streets and Gothic Flemish Renaissance buildings – and directly connected to the globe-spanning shipping routes entered by the North Sea. Accordingly, it has been one of the continent’s essential trade hubs, as well as a prolific incubator of the avant-garde. Isolated from the city, the Antwerp Port Authority building is a lonely presence in an industrial area, a spectacle without an
audience, a presence on the northern skyline. It regularly appeared, lurking in last year’s compelling Irish-Belgian TV drama, Hidden Assets, in which the port area played a crucial role. Te building had won an Open Call in 2008 that linked its building to a proposal for solving the city’s indescribable traffic jams. With Brussels, Antwerp has the unenviable record of the worst traffic congestion in Europe. Te two cities even beat Milan. Teir ring roads are the twin centres of a spider web of highways that are impossible to evade. Travelling across the country, there is no option but to pass at least one or both cities, even if you do not need to be there (and the same is true for the rail network – half of all trains go through Brussels). In Antwerp, the transformation of a listed 1922 fire station into the port authority’s headquarters may look like the city’s largest diamond, but it will no longer sit at the cutting-edge of solving the traffic jams.
Featured in the original visuals of the competition entries was a monumental viaduct connecting the port to the city, linking both banks of the Scheldt, and completing a ring road, that would resolve the traffic problem. By the time the building was completed in 2016, following a referendum, the bridge had been cancelled to be replaced by a two-kilometre tunnel, part of a 15km-long
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