Rooms in Sequence
On Backs Becoming Fronts where Collective Living and Making is Happening Side by Side
D.A. Pankotai (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
L.G.A.J. Reinders – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M.G.J. van Gelderen – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
“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.