ECAM Mixed Facilities

Programme

Large-capacity crèche, sports halls, educational facilities, artist’s studio, cafeteria, municipal administrative offices, playground, park in the interior of the block.

Dispositions is the title of Agwa’s first retrospective. Their architectural and landscape rehabilitation project for the site of the former École Centrale des Arts et Métiers in Saint-Gilles, Brussels, is one of the six projects featured in the exhibition, which retraces twenty years of practice. This project exemplifies the firm’s preferred three-stage spatial and architectural strategy. The first stage consists of ‘taking measures to change a situation’. Here, the main decision was to take advantage of a trans- versal block to transform it into a public garden over which the new programme extends; to make it a space of biodiversity by using diverse plant species, with maximum surface permeability and water management using contouring and a storm water basin. A crossing place thus becomes a meeting place. This is followed by "spatial measures". Here the architects opted to give new legibility to the block by optimizing the existing buildings as far as possible and minimizing the footprint of new construction. The old and new structures adjoin and intertwine, bringing a new spatial coherence. Finally, for the architects, the architecture must be understood as ‘making spatial structures available’. This was a particularly appropriate strategy for this project, where the programme kept evolving throughout the process. Conceiving of architecture in spatial terms corresponds to a long-term approach, allowing for changes in use and users, while at the same time offering a generous spatial dimension and a durable structure. This strategy is also reflected in the building that marks the en- trance to the park at 110 Rue Théodore Verhaegen. Initially a simple porch, structural constraints led to a reflection on its height. From offering a balcony over the city and the park to becoming, eventually, the park workshop: a protected but unheated space, which can be completely dismantled and reused, where only the explicit structure continues to play its role. A multi-purpose public asset that serves as a lantern for the neighbourhood at nightfall.

Audrey Contesse