Weaving Matter

Abstract

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.