Sint-Jans Gasthuis

In 1934, using the money received to restore the destroyed refuge, the social services did, after all, build a new St John’s Refuge on the southern edge of the village. This modest building was already more modern than the typical reconstruction architecture. The OCMW (social services) gave Poot Architectuur the job of renovating the refuge with its temporary accommodation, bringing it up to present-day standards. Sarah Poot and her colleagues reduced the number of housing units at the ‘refuge’ from twelve to seven and added several communal amenities, including a collective washroom and bicycle storage facility. They also restored the cross-shaped circulation on the two floors and moved the staircase to an openwork octagonal extension outside the volume of the existing building, from which it also derived its colours: a combination of white and rust-red. Poot calls the extension a reference to the local eighteenth-century dovecot that was part of the otherwise largely vanished abbey. This reference demonstrates the designers’ relaxed attitude to the heritage, but the dovecot is above all also a good key to the interpretation of the stairwell, as an almost autonomous architectural object, as an attractively constructed kiosk or a summer house that could actually fit in anywhere.

This text is based on the essay of Maarten Liefooghe, which has been published in the Flanders Architectural Review N°14. When Attitudes Take Form