Our final year project divides into two phases. The first is an inquiry into the Belgian house, the characteristic Belgian pattern of built development and recent advances on the housing front in Belgium. This phase crystallized in a written analysis. In the subsequent phase, the insights thus obtained were worked up into a strategic design. A possible site for this design is a narrow zone along a motorway and railway line on the edge of Ghent city centre. Comparable sites can be found in every Belgian city.

In a move to staunch the demographic and economic outflow from Ghent, the city council drew up a development plan. This plan informed our programme for a structure 1000 m long and 150 m tall at its highest point. Dispersed across its framework are abstractions of Belgian terraced houses and parts of houses. The party walls together constitute a storey-high supporting structure. Hitching residential units together creates floor and ceiling slabs of high loadability between which larger-scale activities such as hypermarkets, businesses, offices and educational institutes can be inserted. The different functions are linked vertically by lifts and horizontally by boulevards at various levels. Underground, road and rail traffic intermesh with areas for parking and distribution. At ground level, city traffic and urban public space encroach on the station concourse and the trade fair hall. This central hall ties the city to the river and the open space beyond.

The structural principle and the physical manifestation in steel and concrete are essential factors for the structure's flexibility. Its supporting frame is permanently visible through the glazed cladding. The building can be continually adapted to its surroundings or to changing needs. The structure is all-absorbing and enables unexpected links and confrontations between the most wide-ranging functions and spaces. Interweaving, mixing, compaction and flexibility - these are the supreme qualities of the Belgian terraced house and the Belgian pattern of built development. Infrastructure as organizing principle, wholly in line with the Belgian planning tradition - it is a new form of urbanity that creates space. This concentrated, vertical form of development leaves an open area alongside the 19th-century belt, exposing the adjoining district of Moskou as a fossilized relic of the Belgian policy of dispersal.

Place of education: AvB Tilburg
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Pnina Avidar, Wim Cuyvers, Martien Jansen, Leon Mevis