UNDECIDED FRAMES

Bruxelles 1070

Jacopo Anzolin. Diploma project with Professor Kersten Geers.

Brussel, a city once deeply rooted in an industrial heritage, is today investing in policy to redevelop urban manufactures into the city, completely converted to tertiary.

The aim of the project is to develop a Centre de Formation de Metièrs, creating a framework that embraces a diversity of practices related to the world of craft and art in a multidisciplinary context such as a Hall of Many Things. The site lays exactly at the edge of two mono functional areas: an industrial and a residential one. The intention depicted from the site plan is to formally reconnect the neighbourhood into one hybrid solution: a mixed use building for working, living and learning. Simply interlocking the two volumes, representing this two different worlds, the interconnection of the two is assumed as a collective space for the this learning institution. The housing and the production space becomes different, yet interconnected moments taking over an idea of champ or field, a landscape of moments just inside one building. The project in its very simplistic appearance is conceived as a pivotal element of the neighborhood, and its presence is strictly related to the different context every time is facing it, from the functional aspect from the river to the monumentality from the street, underlining the istitutionalized character of the buulding: a framework that embraces a diversity of practices and allows for a multitude of voices related to the world of craft and art. This friction generates a various sets of thresholds that allow different levels of publicness of the complex, from the street to the garden and from the workshop to the housing units. Housing blocks are combined to be one extended public floor, and thoughts to explore different ways to live the proximity to the factory.