This thesis project explores Brussels as a place within which to situate and test the significance of breaks in the urban environment, which through their compelling tactility can act as apertures into past, present and future urban conditions. All cities can be studied as an entanglement of urban phenomena that reflect both their successes and inadequacies; constructed and disappearing, continuous and separated. Yet few among them demonstrate such a stark contrast between the outward image conveyed and the disparities that exist at the core, which is analogous to Brussels’ most defined east and west quarters: the European Quarter and the canal district.
As a notably fractured place, the project seeks to test the meaning of gaps as both descriptor and opportunity, otherwise situated in the shadows of these two poles of the city. Beginning with the evidence of three distinct yet related urban conditions in Brussels – disconnection from history, spatial fragmentation and social disclusion – slices are proposed to be situated as intermediaries that unfold as a continuous public scaffold. This occurs in three scenarios that address different scales of the problem, each carefully considering the importance of what remains, what is altered and what is new as a way to unify different identities of the city. Ultimately what is created is a system of operations that can be applied to any set of fragmented urban environments to introduce new forms of interaction between people and places.
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CURRENT ISSUES (diagrams)
Due to a number of issues studied throughout the research phase of this project, the city remains today as a collection of forgotten parts. Both latent inadequacies and potentials are hidden beneath the façade of large urban moves, and revealed at small sites of decay. This project will engage these forgotten parts as resources for the creation of a re-valued urban environment that is a palimpsest of multi-scalar transformations; adding a new layer that addresses many complex urban issues without erasing the latent qualities of the place.
SITES
In direct response to the challenges laid out during the research phase, three distinct scales of challenge have been selected, which directly relate to three different historic ruptures and are distinctly legible in three parcels of the city. The three project locations are as follows:
The first, Zone A responds to the concealing of the Senne River from 1871. It addresses revealing the complex history of the city through punctures that act as apertures into forgotten layers of successive transformation.
The second, Zone B responds to the division created by the extruded regional train line. The intervention spans through the harsh border in order to unify two sides of an infrastructural wall that currently disables activity.
The third, Zone C responds to the isolating effect of its peripheral location and the diminishing of the human scale. The intervention seeks to extend the public realm with a continuous social network that mediates between large scale (industrial and institutional) and small scale (residential and service) programs.
METHOD
This project applies architecture not as a band-aid to larger social, environmental and political issues, but is inherently grounded in its physical and operative moves, seeking to strengthen the bond between people and place; body and sensory experience. Existing artefacts are re-invented in a sensitive manner to augment the relationship between past, present and future. The intervention on each site is treated as a new layer that adds to the palimpsest of history that has been built up over time. So while the new is recognizable, traces of the old remain present. The interventions are related and respond to each other through the operative mode of intervention that builds throughout the process. By directly linking each intervention to a different physical scale, they naturally unfold to a different degree of resolution.
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ZONE A
The proposal treats gaps as apertures into recovered historic sites that unfolds as a sequence of continuous punctures through the blocks. This sets up a new relationship between occupant and city.
With the sample site, exploration occurs at more of a detail and material level to look at the ways that a new public route can instigate careful transformation of the existing fabric.
ZONE B
Here an arts and culture funnel is proposed, which excavates from the extruded infrastructure and bisects it with program that feeds out into each neighbourhood.
The example intervention occupies a vacant site adjacent the massive infrastructural border, and unfolds from a baren façade with a transformable scaffolding. Two different scenarios are represented to suggest how occupants could take ownership over the site.
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ZONE C
The final proposal creates a scaffold of public space that offers access to a series of finer grain building typologies that promote hybridized use. Programmatically, this emphasizes fluidity between existing and new activities, where the new acts to extend the reach of the business and trade schools.
The example site is representative of the opportunity to bring together industry, students and the neighbourhood. New vertical surfaces and circulation elements are paired with open air spaces to encourage social gathering.
