‘The repurposing of the Ghent Belgacom tower is just as much an urban planning project as an architectural one. The current, sturdy T-shaped block, with its hard facades and raised plinth, does not seek any contact with the surrounding historic urban fabric, a disproportion corrected in the new design.
Studio Name: GAFPA
Desing Team: GAFPA / Coussée & Goris Architecten / Exedra
Area: East Flanders
Year: 2015
Location: Ghent
Consultants: engineering office mouton
Photography Credits: GAFPA
The gesture consists in freeing up the main building and grafting four new slender volumes onto it.
A light, horizontally articulated facade is wrapped around this figure like a cloak, folded to respond precisely to the context.
Terraces and urban gardens, stretched between the building and the facade, extend the urban life of the forecourt and the surrounding park to the top of the building. A maligned, anti-urban monolith thus becomes a new, open and light, benchmark for Ghent.’
