Dexia / Atelier Pierre Hebbelinck

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Text description provided by the architects. A typically Belgian street entering a town. The traffic is dense on this simple caesura bordered by houses forming two walls and traced amongst fields and prairies. The bank agency is decrepit. The proposition consists in demolishing it to keep only the basements on which the volume, slightly placed out of synch from the axis of the street and the buildings of the bank.

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The programme analysis gives a trapezoid prism. The little side encompasses customer services and the largest volume widely opens onto the countryside from the east of the building. The simplicity of the plan and the cut translates in a pure volume, the envelope of which is compact and bears very few openings in its lateral sides, thus allowing to highlight the depths and powerful play of the piercing lights, reminiscent of a bellows mantle camera.

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The central area was emptied out in such a way to perceive all the activities of the agency, the movements taking place on all the floors. Artist Pierre Toby elaborated a project to put into perspective these depths using colours. The research work allowed elaborating a relationship to displacements and bodies using multiple grasping details (hand-rails, handles, design of doors…). The publishing house of the Atelier d’Architecture published the book “Outils (tools)” relating the processes that generated the project.

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