MAD Fashion and Design Platform

In 2010, the Brussels Capital Region and the City of Brussels established MAD (Mode & Design): the city’s showcase for its local fashion designers and other creatives. The V+ firm of architects and ROTOR won the competition for the renovation of a number of industrial buildings in which to house the MAD offices and showrooms. There is something surprisingly fresh about their project, as a result of the tolerance shown towards the existing buildings and materials during the renovation. The old structures were retained, faults and all, and the demolition was executed with surgical precision. As a result, the conglomeration of inadequate and sometimes badly designed buildings that had accumulated organically over the last sixty years was transformed into a new whole, with no distinction between old and new. The occasionally wretched quality of the existing architecture provided the focus for a spatial sequence: a smaller doubleheight space, a broad, lower space with a through-view, a central double-height space with mezzanine, and a succession of large spaces. The existing spatial quality is further accentuated by using as many white (or near-white) materials for the interior finishing. In this way, the spaces play on and question the codes of the white cube, without lapsing into the pure and white atmosphere of the museum that is typically associated with this type of programme. It is multiple shades of whiteness that lends each space its own character and forges disparate elements into a single entity.

Véronique Patteeuw

This project is published in Flanders Architectural Review N°13. This Is a Mustard Factory