Prentenkabinet Plantin-Moretus

The Plantin-Moretus Museum is housed in a succession of houses and workshops, rooms, passageways, courtyards and gardens that has grown in the course of history. The extremely valuable collection held by the Print Room – comprising books, prints and engravings, as well as printing type and plates – was in need of a new, speciallyequipped archive and storage space, plus a new reading room. A new building with its own street-level entrance was constructed on a separate plot as the final component the existing urban fabric. The ground floor houses the reading room and the collections are kept in rooms on the first and second floors. Daylight is drawn into the reading room through a glass roof at the rear of the building, although this cannot be seen from the reading room itself. To create a quiet and warm atmosphere in which to work, materials such as brown leather were used on the tables and walls, while brass, wood, black steel and terrazzo also feature. All of these materials allude to the techniques of book printing and binding. The street façade is a composition by the artist Benoît van Innis, with stiles and rails in solid wood that refer to the half-timbered façades of the past. The large areas of glass allow for direct eye contact between inside and outside.

Pieter Uyttenhove

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