Meir - Twaalfmaandenstraat
On a corner plot of Antwerp’s busiest shopping street, DMT architecten realized this residential building with a commercial plinth. The façade speaks a contemporary classic language and is rather discreet in its surroundings. Its volume, on the other hand, is more expressive. The lower floors are high, and are articulated with two-storey window bays that bring to mind a multi-legged table. The stacked apartments above form a modest corner tower that can communicate with a landmark tower nearby. This volume pulls back a little from one of the neighbouring houses, one of the last remaining sixteenth-century houses on this street. Its cornice appears appropriate on the different sides of the corner. The building tries to nuance the morphology of the city, reaching out to the different layers of time surrounding it.
- Louis De Mey
Composite Presence at Biennale Architettura 2021
This project is part of the exhibition Composite Presence in the Belgian pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
DMT architecten: "The architecture of this double project is developed simultaneously in dialogue with the dynamics of Antwerp’s busiest shopping street. The rather modest corner building, with both façades of 15-meters-high, is strategically located between the larger buildings from the interwar period around the KBC tower, and the organically developed parcels on the Meir, including some historic houses. The building has seven floors, the first two are maximally dimensioned for commercial use, the floors above contain apartments and a duplex. The top floor has been withdrawn a few meters from the two building lines and crowns a second main volume that, due to its deeper position, offers space for one of the last small sixteenth-century houses on the Meir.
The building height, the facade articulation and the balcony refer to the demolished nineteenth-century corner building. The spacious ceiling heights facilitate the intended monumentality of the facades. Deeply placed windows suggest mass, some shallow offsets nuance the façade surface. The strict arrangement of the façade openings was partly released in the second higher volume. A recess of the façade on the fifth floor reduces the high corner building to two low houses in the Twaalfmaandenstraat."
