Description
Close to Brussels’ Quartier Nord, this project is located in a heterogeneous built environment that includes several housing towers, a fire station, and an educational farm. It was built simultaneously with the refurbishment of an office building on the other site of the block with which it shares a garden, designed by Erik Dhont, set on the roof of a semi-buried garage. The five-storey-high building offers different apartment typologies of one, two, or three bedrooms. Above this volume, two rooftop apartments, a simplex and a duplex, are designed as autonomous glass boxes. The ground floor is raised 1.1 m above the pavement to enhance the dwellings’ privacy. Each floor – with the exception of the first floor, which comprises six dwellings – accommodates four apartments, grouped two by two around two vertical circulation cores. The standard dwellings include a through living room, with two bedrooms at the rear, one bedroom at the front, and a central core of wet rooms. The apartments are fully glazed and have continuous, narrow – 50 cm – concrete balconies. They become wider on the garden side in front of the living rooms. A thin, galvanised-steel structure holds the railings and colourful vertical panes used to separate terraces.
Exterior view
Rear view
Interior view
Originally published in: Gérald Ledent, Alessandro Porotto, Brussels Housing. Atlas of Residential Building Types, Birkhäuser, 2023.