Movement to Presence
L.S. Künstner (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M.G.J. van Gelderen – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
L.G.A.J. Reinders – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
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.