-
Architects: D’HOUNDT+BAJART Architects & Associates
- Area: 417 m²
- Year: 2014
-
Photographs:Julien Lanoo
-
Manufacturers: Nelissen, RZB
Text description provided by the architects. A small building, at the confluence of the strange and the familiar
Preamble
“Guy at Nightclub: You look like a clown in that stupid jacket.
Sailor: This is a snakeskin jacket! And for me it's a symbol of my individuality, and my belief... in personal freedom.
Guy at Nightclub: jerk.
Sailor: C'mere.”
Wild at heart – 1990 – David Lynch
A unifying and fun building
The urban challenge was to create a frame edge structuring this corner plot whose boundaries are based on low hosted terraced buildings, at the Marx Dormoy and Léon Blum streets. At the corner, the school restaurant’s parapet ascends gently, creating a bow that hides the restaurant’s technical equipment (central air handling and heat pump) while freeing the ground floor. The architectural treatment is contextual in its urban form and its materiality; the use of the brick, which dominates the landscape, has received a contemporary and qualitative review showcasing the polychrome emblematic brick bonding of the regional architecture. The layout of the masonry, with an almost random pattern, evokes the snake skin and activates the imaginary potential, architecture and young children dream-like: in a world where you have to respect the rules of the urban game, the building delivers a message of imagination, and seems, with its "snake skin" and "scale-like windows" to have the power to move...
A protected and relaxing space
The facades of the restaurant, monolithic and protective, form a boundary, almost an organic membrane, and isolate from the street this place where calm and privacy are needed without locking the user; with its set of windows on two levels, small and big, can, at a glance, kiss the street without being visible from the outside. If the walls form a filter, the inside of the restaurant expands horizontally into two very bright areas open onto an interior garden.
Quote
« The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious »
Albert Einstein
