What if cities could once again become places of production, not only consumption? Over the past sixty years productive spaces have been progressively displaced from cities like Brussels, despite its historical role as one of the pioneering centres of the Industrial Revolution in mainland Europe. This shift has increased environmental costs, reduced economic diversity and limited access to employment for lower-qualified or newly arrived populations. These conditions are particularly visible in the Heyvaert district of Brussels – an arrival neighbourhood characterised by migration, informal economies and a shortage of adequate housing.

This project explores how productive activities can be reintegrated into dense urban environments through the transformation of an existing industrial site into a brewery, social restaurant and collective housing complex. It investigates how an urban block can function as an infrastructure for arrival, providing housing, employment opportunities, skill development and spaces for social exchange. Rooted in Belgium’s longstanding brewing heritage and the history of lambic production in the Senne valley, the brewery serves as a form of small-scale urban manufacturing capable of supporting local employment and knowledge transfer. A social restaurant complements this program by creating opportunities for work, skill development and encounter. Together, they challenge the separation of living, working and leisure that has characterised much modern urban development.

Reuse is a key focus of this project. Existing industrial structures are treated not as obstacles but as resources capable of accommodating new forms of inhabitation. Through careful analysis and selective transformation, parts of the existing fabric are preserved, adapted or removed. The demolition of a central hall creates a shared courtyard that improves light, air and spatial connections while becoming the social centre of the project.

The ground floor accommodates production and public functions that activate the street, the future linear park following the traces of the Senne and the courtyard itself, while the upper floors provide a mix of temporary and long-term affordable housing. More broadly, the project proposes a contemporary urban model in which making, living and gathering are once again understood as complementary parts of city life.
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Anderlecht, located downhill from the city centre of Brussels, was an important industrial centre where meat was processed, and textiles were spun, woven, and dyed. Today, the remaining vast industrial lots are used as hangars for storage and reselling businesses. A stream of incoming goods deposits waste into the Heyvaert quarter, creating a residue of material sediment on the streets. These remnants offer cues and traces of the ongoing choreographies of production, exchange and everyday life that shape the neighbourhood. A collection of objets trouvés, gathered during fieldwork in Anderlecht, formed the basis for understanding the site.
This thesis approaches the city as an objet trouvé. A covered passage, a worker’s impasse, a steel structure, a hidden tower, these form the starting point of the project. The architectural interventions come from arranging and reworking these, making an assemblage. The site itself is a composite of former industrial buildings, workers’ houses and warehouses. Through their assemblage, the limits between buildings, properties, and users become blurred, creating a different relationship between city, block and room.
With careful interventions of cutting and removing, an open space is carved out to connect the covered passage and the workers’ impasse. A new canopy links these interior streets and disparate buildings, while a central garden becomes the collective room of the ensemble. Stairs are used to bring fragmented pieces together and become the heart of the two collective housing units of the project. Hemp insulation redraws the boundaries of the buildings and loops them together to create vast working halls for the textile laboratory.
Rather than proposing a complete and autonomous object, the project understands architecture as a fragment within a larger urban fabric. By rediscovering urban features, it transforms an enclosed industrial enclave into a porous ensemble that reframes living, working and the collective within the city. ... Read more

The project is rooted in the Heyvaert neighbourhood of Anderlecht, a dense urban fabric shaped by its industrial past, dominated by the export car trade, and traversed by successive waves of migration that have made it one of the most culturally diverse areas of the capital.
Heyvaert Insufflé embodies the ambition to breathe new life into the neighbourhood. This renewal unfolds through a subtle and carefully considered intervention on the site, a gentle breath that comes to clear and reorder a chaotic, saturated site.
The word insufflé also carries a sensory dimension, evoking air itself: the warm, vaporous steam of a hammam drifting from the chimney of a former industrial building. An air that carries a smell, that of a new soap factory reactivating the productive past of the plot.
Grounded in extensive fieldwork, the project develops a mixed programme aimed at reactivating the site while addressing the most pressing social challenges of the area such as the invisibility of women in public space.
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Heyvaertwijk in Anderlecht, Brussels, is a neighbourhood whose residents are unfairly treated. Public and private space keeps being taken away from them. The streets are dominated by the car trade. Safe, usable and green public space is barely present. And yet the people who live here have built something real. Community, warmth, pride. That is easy to miss if you do not stop to look.

This project stopped to look. It moved through the neighbourhood on foot, through conversation and direct encounter, before arriving at a proposal. Not to fix the neighbourhood, but to support what is already there. To give residents the space and housing they deserve and have long been denied.

The focus is Sergeant De Bruynestraat, a street on the east side of the Abattoir that comes alive on market days but goes quiet the moment the stalls are gone as faced by closed walls. Four buildings are proposed along this route: Hoek, Eetzaal, 1820 and De Herberg. Together they define a new public square. One with eyes on the street, life at different hours and a reason to be there beyond Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

This is a possibility. One in which residents can claim and build upon their space. ... Read more

How can participatory knowledge production enhance processes of adaptation in complex and fragmented neighbourhoods like Heyvaert?

Contemporary architectural discourse increasingly positions reuse as a primary design strategy, reframing existing building stock as an active condition for architectural production. This shift displaces conventional notions of finality, foregrounding resilience and maintenance as architectural values that emerge through reinterpretation of the existing. A building is approached neither as a static object to be preserved in its historical state, nor as something to be demolished outright, but as a situation shaped by successive uses and adaptations over time, just as we can see it in Heyvaert. This demands specific knowledge that cannot be gained through conventional abstract planning alone but must be learned by direct engagement through testing, observing and experimenting.
Heyvaert, located in the canal zone of Brussels, is characterized by a dense urban fabric shaped by a long history of transformation, from a strongly industrialized area towards a heterogeneous urban condition in which multiple temporalities and uses coexist within the same physical framework. Apartment buildings, small-scale industry, and the global second-hand car trade overlap, forming a unique layered urban condition.

It is a neighbourhood that is both productive and contested.

The project is situated at Quai de l’Industrie [69–75] and operates within this context as part of an active car dealership, while still retaining traces of its earlier industrial occupation. Three buildings are structured around a courtyard that opens towards the canal. Externally, they maintain their original industrial skin, while internally they are highly adapted to their current use. Conditions vary significantly across different parts of the building, spatially as well materially and reflect long- term processes of incremental adaptation through repair, extension, and modification. This shows that adding and changing according to current needs is a highly common practice, which stands in in contrast to the proposed new Heyvaert Plan.

The programmatic transformation of the buildings is realized through an ongoing process of adaptation and structured into phases of a classical architectural process. Making, experimenting, and documenting become the primary spatial and operational conditions of the buildings. Architectural interventions such as material removal, opening-up operations, and the construction or modification of party walls are reinterpreted as didactic devices, transforming the site into an active learning environment. Agency is positioned as central. In line with a approach, the neighbourhood is invited to engage with the transformation as a hands-on process of learning. Participation is framed as a form of knowledge production, where interventions are recorded, accumulated, and shared as a collective resource. A specialty of the project is that the main craftsmen can live on the premises permanently and develop their homes and work environment together. With an emphasis on experimentation, the project defines an open-ended process of continuous adaptation. This process is guided by the condition, focusing on what the building and its material details can afford in forms of missing qualities, atmospheres, and climatic adaptation, in order to become a resilient and functional building assemblage. Furthermore, it embraces the rawness and the poetry of the ordinary, seeking an expressive architectural language. Supported by the concept of the as both an analytical and generative tool, the project engages with overlapping spatial and social histories, allowing them to remain visible while being continuously reinterpreted.

The building becomes the teacher! ... Read more

 What happens when you conceive the architect as a set designer? In this project, architecture operates as a sequence of scenes, where each space has its own meaning within a larger narrative. The living set of the research and the design is an existing industrial building, which was transformed from a metal cans and boxes factory into a garage for repairing and selling second-hand cars. Its character has two different faces: an open front façade overlooking the busy Rue Heyvaert, and a closed, blind façade facing a quiet square. Rather than erasing this set, the project acts with what is already visible and invisible on stage and backstage. Its backdrop is the neighbourhood of Heyvaert, Brussels, which has become a home to many migrant workers. Today, it remains an Arrival City: a transitional space where actors enter, settle temporarily and move on. The setting is improvised and constantly changing due to economic pressure and poor maintenance, which pushes its inhabitants into an act of survival, and leaves little room for collective care. Inspired by the Peckham Experiment (south-east London, 1926-1950), the project proposes a space for preventive social medicine through the organisation of a series of spatial scenes, in which different aspects of collective well-being and daily life meet, and become visible and accessible. The interventions preserve the identity of the former factory, while reorganising the existing set and introducing a new performance of preventive care. This includes not only spatial changes, such as cutouts and openings which bring daylight into the building, but also the movement of props, performers and spectators. A 1:33 model with a supporting script bridges the gap between architecture and set design, and explores how the sequence of scenes within the former factory in Heyvaert can be designed as a preventive social medicine. The project offers a script for a community stage, in which the spotlight shifts from metal to humans, and from repair to prevention. ... Read more

How to be both proposes the transformative reuse of a former tannery and second-hand car export garage into a new ensemble of buildings negotiating various forms of dwelling and making. The programmes all orbit around and land in a central ‘polyvalent yard’, through which daily negotiations for access, delivery, leisure and noise are all platformed, along with connectivity to two nearby parks.

Blending industrial architecture with forms borrowed from the arched windows of the existing brick tannery below, top-up structures exploit the oversized structural foundations built over a century ago to ward off Brussels’ marshy geology. The design balances site-specific, programme-specific aims with the baked-in possibility for future adaptation, resulting in a mass timber structural lattice around which prefabricated hempcrete-filled panels comprise the top-ups’ breathable envelopes.

Rooted in conversations with local actors and a participatory workshop, a typology of relationships between dwelling and making are crafted for the site. What if you had an atelier in your apartment? A workshop beneath your flat? A studio in your studio? What if your next-door neighbours were mushroom farmers, chair designers or second-hand car exporters? How can you live in a community where the contradictions and inconveniences of the city aren’t shied away from, but confronted and embraced?

The project humbly explores what happens when you don’t have to decide. It explores How to be both. ... Read more

The project aims to link three worlds of Rue du Compas, Rue Ropsy Chaudron and Park de la Sennete. Mediation between a busy shopping street, narrower, more residential one and the park is carried out by exploring themes of boundaries, spatial intricacies and urban patchwork. The project of a social housing answers the demand of the neighbourhood to provide affordable and good quality living. It also introduces functions that are ment to strengthen the local community and contributes to creating an identity of the neighbourhood.
To achieve a sense of transformation in ownership in between spaces the themes of accessibility, visibility, soft boundaries and zoning are introduced. As a result, places of inticacies are designed, where changed sequence in these factors determines the character and usage of semi-private and semi-public areas within the project.
Because the park is directly connected to a school and there is a lack of representation of the elderly, children and women in the neighbourhood, the project includes a day-care centre as an attempt to create a kids-friendly environment in the park on an axis between the school and the proposed day-care centre. Such a programme can increase the diversity of users of the public spaces in the neighbourhood.
The final outcome is a proposal of a social housing integrated in the urban tissue of Heyvaert district both functionally as well as in terms of identity, supported by functions strengthening the local community. It aims to create a haven for its residents and correspond to its surrounding by activizing the diverse usage of public spaces. ... Read more

“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 thesis explores how the urban form can be reconfigured to create more equal
opportunities for women in Almere, one of the largest NewTowns in the Netherlands.
Developed from the ambitious planning paradigms of the 1970s onwards, it priori
tised efficiency, functional separation and normative household models. Almere’s
urban structure shapes everyday life in ways that limit or enable access to social,
economic and spatial opportunities unevenly. In this context, this thesis addresses
the following research question:
How can dominant urban design paradigms in Almere be transformed
through the implementation of opportunity structures for young profes
sional women in order to support a more just city?
This project takes a feminist approach while focusing on young professional wom
en, combining critical urban theory with qualitative and spatial methods. First, it
explores how opportunity structures are defined for women. Secondly, it situates
Almere within the broader historical context of NewTown development and feminist
critiques of urban form. Based on this theoretical foundation, the project examines
women’s lived experiences through a literature review, site visits, interviews and
ethnographic go-along mapping. These methods reveal how urban design influenc
es daily routines, mobility patterns, caregiving practices and perceptions of safety,
highlighting the tensions between women’s everyday realities and the city’s domi
nant spatial design.
In the final phase, the identified socio-spatial constraints are reconfigured into a set
of opportunity structures to better support young professional women’s daily lives.
Through research-by-design and spatial patterns, these structures connect theo
ry, lived experience and spatial strategy. The resulting multi-scalar design demon
strates that feminist urban design is not a symbolic gesture, but a structural reor
ganisation of how the city distributes opportunity. ... Read more

How can a forgotten, hidden industrial fragment transform into a vibrant space of public gathering? This project began with a per­sonal curiosity of the neighbourhood of Anderlecht, specifically Heyvaert and how the buildings shape the area it is today. These layers of time shown through unnoticed buildings and concealed fac;ades reveal the complex nature of how the area was built up. Porosity serves as the main tool of research, to explore how to reactivate the plot on different scales. From large moments of interventions such as creating openings to connect one space to another, to smaller scales, such as the design of a single window opening. A cluster of buildings presents itself, containing the Is­lamic Academy of Brussels, a former ceramics factory, a primary school, housing and behind these fac;ades, lays the former iron factory; the spine of the collection of buildings.
To reactivate the production identity of the Anderlecht, the for-mer ceramics factory revives itself, producing architectural ce­ramics and household items, while the existing functions remain preserved. However, an extra layer is introduced to reactivate
the social aspects of the neighbourhood. Heyvaert lacks social third spaces, which is an aspect that will be introduced in this project. Creating a passage from the street to the large hall, even­tually connecting all the fragmented buildings into one space. Public functions such as a cafe and rentable spaces are added
to breathe new life into the hall. To create porous spaces, some demolition is inevitable, but demolition always comes with im­provement. Architecturally, the existing buildings are treated with care, and all the layers of change are evidently distinct. The new kiln for the ceramics factory stands at the heart of the hall, and not only invites users to gather round but also operates as a thermal provider. In this way, the kiln becomes both a social and environ­mental catalyst within the project. Porosity, in the end, is not only a tool, but an invitation to stitch the neighbourhood together. ... Read more

In the quarter of Heyvaert, much is present, but little visible. A small network of communal initiatives exists alongside the dominant car industry, yet remains largely invisible in the public realm. The issue is not necessarily the absence of social structures, but their lack of spatial visibility. This project questions how architecture can make these communal functions accessible in a context where industrial activity has taken over the street.

Rather than designing a social programme, the project combines surrounding functions so that shared use becomes a direct outcome. A community centre emerges from the interaction between care, sports, and educational activities.

The design works with the existing spatial conditions of the site, such as the setback that forms an entrance space and the surrounding exterior areas. These are not treated as leftover space, but as active parts of the project.

The intervention is positioned as a clear addition within the existing fabric. It distinguishes itself through construction and detail, allowing both the existing buildings and the new intervention remain readable in relation to each other.

In this way, the project positions architecture not as a solution to broader socio-economic conditions, but as a tool to expose existing layers, make communal functions accessible and facilitate encounters. ... Read more

This project explores the transformation of an existing industrial block in the Heyvaert district in Brussels, an area currently evolving from an industrial zone into a more mixed urban environment. Characterized by closed façades and hidden interior worlds of workshops, informal activities and garages. The site reveals a strong contrast between public appearance and internal spatial depth. The design responds by opening the block and creating a connection between Heyvaert Street and the new linear park.

The proposal is a transformation of old garages into circular food hub that integrates production, processing, consumption, and reuse through programs such as a greenhouse, bakery school, food lab, ateliers, restaurant, and market. A central courtyard acts as the social and spatial core where different users meet and interact.

Rather than presenting architecture as a fixed object, the project investigates how space is continuously shaped through occupation, use, and memory. Using the dinner as an architectural framework. Before the meal, space appears ordered and intentional. During the meal, this clarity dissolves. Movements overlap, conversations spill across boundaries, and the architecture is tested through use. Afterward, only traces remain disarranged objects, stains, fragments quietly recording both time and use. Through multiple perspectives around the table, architecture emerges as a dialogue between spatial structure and human presence, revealing a continuously evolving relationship between order, use, and time.
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In the north of the Heyvaert neighbourhood lies a former lead- and leather factory which was used from 1875 to 1970. It grew during this time through the addition and expansion of different volumes. All these additions feature different, characterizing shaped roofs, such as sawtooth or pitch roofs, creating a building typical of the area.

The building is now a large car garage, a trade renowned in the Heyvaert neighbourhood. Although this industry is thriving, it also causes significant nuisance. The government’s goal is to improve the quality of life in accordance with established environmental and urban objectives. One of the largest interventions is the linear Parc de la Sennette, a network of green zones through the neighbourhood.

The education in the area will also have to improve, the Heyvaert neighbourhood has one of the highest education inequality rates in Brussels with children traveling all over the city to attend a Dutch speaking school. The former factory with its large halls lends itself perfectly to being transformed into a primary school located next to the Klein Zenne park.

In the centre of the school will be a main axis that connects the park on one side to the street and the rest of the neighbourhood on the other. In addition, this axis will internally connect the classrooms and assembly hall with the adjacent functions such as childcare, adult education, library and back offices. The canteen at the end of the axis on the park side, will open up the school toward the park and residents of the neighbourhood.

All these functions are located under different roofs, each of which also has its own type of load bearing structure. To preserve this identity of the building addition will be made in a freestanding timber structure that remains a distinct element in itself. The whole design aims to retain the character of the existing building while allowing it to continuously adapt to changes in the neighbourhood over time.
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Perched on the slope leading up to the bridge and overlooking the canal, the Castle appears from afar as a shifting figure marking the entrance to the Heyvaert neighbourhood.

The project is situated on a site defined by a unique spatial condition. Located between two streets at different elevations and connected to the bridge crossing the Brussels–Charleroi canal, it contains an active industrial building accessible from both levels, creating the unusual situation of a site with two ground floors. Through fieldwork, interviews with local actors, and discussions with the owner of the building, the project identified both the challenges facing the neighbourhood and the latent potential contained within the existing structure. These observations led to a central question: how can new urban development be introduced without erasing the activities, spaces, and communities already present?

The proposal builds upon the existing industrial building rather than replacing it. Productive activities remain at ground level, while new housing, commercial spaces, and collective facilities are added above. A public square is introduced on the roof of the existing structure, creating a new meeting place and a pedestrian connection between the two streets. Around this square, commercial spaces extend the neighbouring market and food-related activities already present on the site, while a community canteen operated by Culturghem provides a place for encounter and exchange. Social housing forms a central component of the project, with a particular focus on larger family apartments and cluster housing adapted to the demographic realities of the neighbourhood.

More broadly, the project explores an alternative approach to urban transformation. Rather than starting from demolition and replacement, it seeks to work with existing structures, activities, and forms of urban life. In doing so, it proposes a framework in which functions can coexist within a dense urban context. The project does not present a definitive vision for the future of Heyvaert, but instead argues for a form of development that builds upon the qualities already present while remaining open to future change. ... Read more

The Heyvaert is a neighbourhood located at the outskirts of Brussels’ historic city centre. During the industrial revolution the area grew into a dense network of warehouses, workshops and worker’s housing. Development focused on functionality and not on living quality. Throughout its history minimal standards of living and lack of public facilities kept prices low and allowed a low threshold for successive waves of migrants to find a foothold in the Heyvaert, making it an important arrival city.

Presently the area is dominated by second-hand car trade occupying large plots with warehouses. As the sector is declining due to stricter government regulations, these plots are freed and will be used for the government’s new spatial development plans.

However, such plans can erode the exact conditions an arrival city depends on, by rising living costs and replacing industrial infrastructure with housing. What is at stake is not only the neighbourhood itself, but the ecosystem of social agencies that have concentrated here precisely because of its density of need.

The design proposal in this report does not seek to preserve the Heyvaert in its current condition, but it does argue to preserve the arrival function and aims to reinterpret it. The design focuses on the adaptive reuse of a group of warehouses. The proposal transforms the site into a new type of shared living in combination with the productive city.

1) Affordable housing is provided by small but adequate rooms supplemented with shared living.
2) Low barrier work is provided by reintroducing production to the warehouses.
3) The connection to the city will be done by creating public-facing functions and by making the work visible

The new interventions follow the logic of the existing fabric as its robust construction and large span is what make it so adaptable, while integrating a redesigned facade with the future Kleine Senne Park. ... Read more

It may not seem like a place with a common identity at first sight: a random assortment of factories, housing, shops, and restaurants with assortments from all over the world. However, this is exactly what makes Heyvaert neighbourhood special. It is a place shaped by change, slow evolution, and necessity rather than big urban plans, visions or aesthetic.

Heyvaert’s identity is characterized by its diverse multi-ethnic population and its history and present of industry. These elements together create a neighbourhood with a raw industrial character and vibrant street scenes – a dense and capricious urban fabric al-ternating residential and industrial, layering times and styles, and showing signs of many adaptations.
Proposed plans for new building projects in the area, however, seem to relate little to Heyvaert’s rich cultural environment. On the contrary: they threaten to erase and dilute this unique industrial character in favour of more “generic” and contemporary architecture styles.

At the same time, these developments and investments in the public space put pressure on the communities at the heart of Heyvaert’s character. Vulnerable communities of first- and second-generation migrants, often dealing with poverty and language barriers.

ZenneBieb explores both the distinct architecture and the cultural identity of its inhabitants that are both so important to the character of the neighbourhood. The aim is to provide an architectural answer to the new building projects, offering an alternative rooted in local identity through a careful reading of the existing. Additionally, this project develops a program that can add on to the local networks and communities with the objective to provide opportunities for building resilience and emancipation.

ZenneBieb consists of two buildings, framing the Zenne park on both sides from Rue du Compass. It offers on one corner an adult education centre and on the other a library, café and leeszaal, altogether forming a new entry point to the networks in the neigh-bourhood. An inviting “third space, combining the need for a place to be, study and meet. By utilizing an already demolished plot with locally inspired architecture, Zenne-Bieb aims to create inviting public space at the entrance of the park, adding to a sense of place. ZenneBieb draws from the visual identity of its surroundings. It is designed with reused materials from the area, to create a material kinship with its neighbouring archi-tecture.

Involving residents in the design and inviting them to add on to and adapt the building, creates opportunities for adjustment to future needs and will help build a sense owner-ship, strongly anchoring the project in Heyvaert.
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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

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.
... Read more

The project focuses on the urban renewal of an abandoned postindustrial complex in Hoboken, southern Antwerp.
The meticulous process of observing a given site, understanding its identity and documenting findings through various media was inspired by referential artistic endeavors of the past and proves viable today in a time where spatial obsolescence including its potentials is at the forefront of architectural thinking.
Thus a new approach to sustainable use of existing spatial situations was worked out and applied in a final architectural design project assembling a new downtown in an area currently neglected. ... Read more