“A plan is a society of rooms.” -Louis Kahn.

Rooms in Sequence echoes this. The Heyvaert quarter, located west of Brussels’ canal, is a dense, multi-ethnic neighbourhood, a city of arrival, shaped by informal trade, industrial heritage, and a buried river. Its urban blocks are deep. Behind the street façades lie unclaimed interiors: forgotten courtyards, unseen rear walls, spaces too small to build on but too large to belong to anyone.

The site sits enclosed within one of these blocks, embedded like a puzzle piece.
Three buildings and a series of awkward in-between gardens, separating the
structures from one another, overlooked, underloved. This is where the project
begins. Through demolishing, reorganising and renovating, this project explores
how hidden backspaces can be claimed and transformed — not only for those
who live there, but as a way of rethinking the urban fabric itself.

Turning inward, this project creates a microcosm where backs become fronts
and working and living happen side by side. Inspired by K. F. Schinkel’s CourtGardener’s House, old courtyard typologies and the spatial logic of monasteries, the buildings enclose a sequence of gardens that each act as a room: a room for working and making, a room for playing, a room for gathering and socialising, a room for quiet and intimate conversations. These spaces guide the people who move through them. The project is focused inward, but what it creates is not only for its residents. It is for the neighbourhood too.

Fifty residents live here collectively. The floor plan is designed to make people
meet and linger while protecting the privacy of each individual unit. The Art
Deco imprint of the existing building is preserved and considered: rear façades
suddenly become visible, and turn into main ones. New relationships, new
accesses, new perspectives, each facade treated as a front. The adjacent
industrial building gives space to an atelier, where craftsmen work and take on
apprentices, offering accessible education in a neighbourhood that receives
people from everywhere. A café and bike repair sit alongside, tying the productive
and the everyday together.

A society of rooms — for living, for working, for the city. ... Read more

This is a story of Heyvaert, through the eyes of a tailor, a food trader, a resident and the kiosk owner. Employing the concept of the narrative city and theory of everydayness, the project presents a collection of the neighborhood’s lived experiences, routines and encounters. These multiple perspectives revel the city’s nonsingular identity, formed by overlapping and shifting viewpoints.

Following the traces of the local space appropriation, including abandoned furniture, informal storage, food rubbish, and patterns of movement, the project explores the southern side of Heyvaert, dedicated mainly to the food trade sector. The project plot, located in proximity to the slaughterhouse, currently holds multiple uses, including a tailor, a residential unit and grocery shops, reflecting the coexistence of diverse everyday activities within a single urban fragment.

In celebration of these overlapping conditions, the proposal introduces the idea of the kiosk as a spatial binder between the commerce, residential, and productive. The intervention revives the almost forgotten idea of the kiosk as a public catalyst, becoming the meeting ground between the functions and forming a threshold between the street, public and courtyard, private.

What already exists there remains, and the added fabric only emphasizes the layers of materials and the architecture’s evolution over time. Brick becomes one of the protagonists that records the intervention not just as a surface “dressing” but expresses the act of making, through its permanence, texture and capacity to age. It reinforces the idea of continuity and urban memory.

The resulting urban patchwork becomes an architectural celebration of Heyvaert’s heterogeneous identities formed by its users. It frame the the city not as finished object but as a material and social construct continuously produced through the lives and everyday practices of its protagonists.
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Heyvaert, south of Brussels, is an arrival city: a place people move to, move through and move on from, where everything is in motion but little settles. The neighborhood is shaped by industrial history, economic pressure and the second-hand car trade, its streets given over to loading and logistics. Green space and places to gather are scarce. Public life exists, but it has nowhere to rest.
The city‘s answer is the Parc de la Sennette, a planned linear park through the whole neighborhood. Without anchors along it, this risks becoming one more shortcut rather than a destination for those who live here.
So how can the park matter to the people of Heyvaert, as a place they belong to? Rather than invent a new program, the project asks what already holds them here. Mosque and church communities are among the strongest social structures in the neighborhood, yet most stay hidden in adapted garages. Giving them visible space roots public life in what already exists and lets residents claim the park as theirs: it is, after all, their city.
On a central plot, a mosque, an ecumenical church and a community center with hall, café, guesthouse and seminar rooms form a sequence of smaller gathering places, ending in a quieter garden shared by the two. The communities stand close without being forced to mix.
The prayer spaces are built from Heyvaert itself. The plot and the future park are paved in ordinary concrete slabs that must be removed anyway. Instead of discarding them, the project cuts them into blocks, turns them over and stacks them into the load-bearing walls of the mosque and church. The move is simple but decisive: the underside of each slab, normally hidden, holds the imprint of the gravel and soil it was cast on. Turned outward, this rough face becomes the finish of the prayer spaces, inside and out. A plain, infrastructural material is made tactile and specific to this place. For communities carrying traditions from many places, the buildings offers a shared language rooted not in one origin but in common ground. Built from Heyvaert for Heyvaert, the project turns movement into presence: in public life, in ritual, and in the ground itself. ... Read more