project Italiëlei

Almost at the end of a row of larger industrial and office buildings, where large mansions must originally have stood, META designed a building for eight social flats with room for a practice on the ground floor. The project is situated on the Italiëlei in Antwerp, just behind the Koninklijk Entrepot by Hans Kollhoff.

The most prominent element of the building is the freestanding, self-supporting façade. It is built in white prefabricated concrete elements and forms a buffer between the busy street and the dwellings, whose living rooms are at the front because of the orientation of the plot. The façade reveals the composition of the building without telling us any more than is necessary: there is a higher base that contains the practice and, above this, there are floors containing rooms. At the same time, the simplicity of the composition of the façade gives the building the necessary robustness and semantic flexibility.

The eight housing units are accommodated in six virtually identical storeys and a receding volume on the roof, so that the building has the profile of a large townhouse rather than a small block of flats.

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