BELGACOM TOWER

2013

public facilities, polyfunctional house

school project, Ghent

 

 

 

The site is located in the center of Ghent at the crosspoint of the road that connects to the highway and the mound of Schelde in .partly 
building seen as “the abandonned building from the 70s, designed within the modernistic idea. an abandonnendLeieThe site contains amost ugly building in the city” with large and open concrete structure but doesn’t conform with temporary energetic and aesthetic demands.

After we defined the main problem of “the Belgacom site” , which is a mental and physical island in the city, we focused more on Our design is an integrated design. Area and building are seen as one.That’s the reason why the way we act on the building is by giving opportunities, ideas, options,…But we don’t create a totally defined design.The private and public functions merge inside our building as if it became one street, park, … parts of the area and the different atmospheres  that an individual the platform and the building itself into its neighborhood.  By defining the different characteristics in the neighbourhood. In our design process we act fragile and  by small integretate was to cancel the barriers and intension its surroundings . Our main bringsinteventions we tried to open our site to each area in a different way. We were working with the  existing opportunities, which the building and site offer and we tried to take advantage of them as much as possible. While we keept the whole area connected the different atmospheres are fluently transformed one into another.  Also interior and exterior spaces are in the overlaps.

We achieve this by emptying the building, just leaving the structure (pillars, beams and slabs) and communication cores.  This leaves us with edible floors, were the user can buy some lots and adapt them to his needs. (Housing, offices, GYO, terrace, …) The solution for the part with the tower consists in insulating your built volume, creating a box in between the existing floors.

We provide this boxes with all the needed installations by eliminating a slab so we can create an horizontal distribution of all the installations (water, electricity, ventilation, sanitary,…) For the smaller volume there is the same idea as before. In this volume we have the Vertical Farming and the shopping boxes.