Uitbreiding van de internationale Kunstcampus deSingel

Expansion of deSingel international arts campus by Stéphane Beel architects.

Stephane Beel’s extension to DeSingel is an example of the motive of the building as infrastructure, in a form that reflects the complicated genesis of the building. The found context for the extension by Stephane Beel, after more or less four decades, is utterly different from the original. Consecutive building programmes, both by Stynen and a first small extension by Beel himself, and the growth of the institutions housed in the building, have rather drastically transformed the initially fairly simple programme of deSingel.

The volume of the required addition, to house rehearsal studios, exhibition spaces, offices and a restaurant, tested the capacity of the site to its limits. Above all, the bucolic landscape intended to provide the setting for deSingel has disappeared and been replaced by a six-lane motorway ring road and an adjacent railway line. The view from the terrace is now a panorama testifying to Antwerp’s position as a global logistics centre rather than a scene of Virgilian pastures.

Beel’s response to this befits the prosaic context. Most of the new programme is housed in a wood-clad box hovering above the motorway, which advertises the content of deSingel to car and lorry drivers passing by. New public facilities, such as a reading room and a grand café, are situated underneath, on top of lower earthbound boxes also in clad in wood. A floor-to-ceiling glass facade establishes a sense of proximity to the motorway, which is both rather awkward but also immensely beautiful.

This text is based on an article by Christoph Grafe, published in Architecture Review Flanders N°10. Radical Commonplaces. European Architectures from Flanders.