MONOFUNCTIONALITY: The European district is monofunctional (office) and suffers from a cruel lack of shops and entertainment, especially after office hours and on weekends;
The Leopold Village project aims to bring life back to the district, as it is itself a mixed-use project combining the functions of hotel, housing, retail and catering accessible to all users, hotel residents, inhabitants or office workers.
Project Name: Leopold Village
Studio Name: Pierre Blondel Architectes
OPACITY: the European district is made up of opaque, impermeable, massive and often overwhelming buildings.
The Leopold Village project offers visual breaks, a variety of sizes, and facade offsets that enliven the urban landscape. The very glazed facade, full of recesses, contrasts with the opacity of the surrounding office buildings.
The logic of profitability of the promoters and the limit of the size of the buildings has given birth to chubby and inflated buildings that occupy the entirety of the authorized size. The volumetry of the buildings is uniform and unimaginative, it does not take into account the relief or the urban perspectives.
The Léopold project scrupulously respects the surface potential authorized by the PPAS, but distributes it differently, in order to propose a more slender and dynamic architecture.
LOSS OF THE AXIS OF THE MAELBEEK VALLEY: the urbanization of the district has been done around the main traffic routes, which are the Rue de la Loi and the Rue Belliard, with the corollary of creating an orthogonal square, the Place Jean Rey, which denies the morphological reality of the Maelbeek valley. All recent studies have insisted on the importance of this axis of the valley, underlined by the Etterbeek road.
Léopold Village respects the composition of the Place Jean Rey because the alignments of the commercial rez are made according to the initial orthogonal composition; but Léopold Village recognizes the importance of the valley by placing the highest part of the project, on the axis of the valley and facing the park. The project thus reconciles the two compositional axes of the neighborhood.
LACK OF BUILDING SIGNIFICANCE:
The architecture of the Leopold Village project is intended to be lively, human, rich, and meaningful: the most remarkable part of the building, “Leopold”, facing the park, restores the scale of the housing function in a neighborhood where housing has been badly damaged.
NEGLIGENCE OF THE COMMERCIAL FUNCTION: The commercial function, like housing, has been the poor relation of the developments in the European district.
The Leopold Village project is based on a detailed analysis of the commercial function in the neighborhood, the potential market and the existing and future pedestrian flows.
- The Leopold Village project, a response to the constraints of the site.
The project takes into account the constraints of the site and seeks to overcome them while giving them architectural meaning:
1/ The composition follows the path of the tunnel: it is evoked on the surface by the position of the buildings and the open spaces.
2/ The slope of the land is taken up both on the exterior (horizontal terraces) and on the interior
3/ The part of the building on the square is deliberately oriented towards Leopold Park, affirming its attachment to the park and especially to the principle of the valley.
The project integrates the commercial and hotel functions in the most open way possible with the housing function. To ensure an open dimension to the public of the project, the project exploits several devices:
1/ The block is not closed in on itself, an opening through the site allows transparencies (especially on the park), planting in the open ground (in what remains unbuilt), the reading of the functioning of the building from Belliard Street, the opening of a south-western facade on the park for the building on Belliard Street.
2/ Throughout the building, large openings are created on several levels to challenge the prevailing opacity of the neighborhood.
3/ All public and commercial functions on the first floor are treated with large glass surfaces.
The project is therefore the antithesis of the European Community building: varied and not uniform, transparent and not opaque, mixed and not mono-functional, open and not closed in on itself.
