Jeugd- en cultuurhuis De Steen
The local authority had devised a plan to erect a multipurpose building next to the latter, with a youth club, a concert hall, rehearsal room for the brass band, rooms for the art school, a reception room and so on – another example of a combination of scattered activities.
The manner in which ONO architecture developed the idea offers further surprises. The programme is stacked in a compact, tower-like monolith that, together with the brewery’s gleaming fermentation tanks, defines the ‘skyline’ of the municipality.
- Oswald Devisch. This text has been published in the Architecture Review Flanders N°11. Embedded Architecture.
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.
ONO architecture: "De Steen in Bocholt houses a music academy, a youth centre with a small concert hall, and tourist services. Although being a stand-alone figure, the project is very much the result of making connections with its context. In its materiality, the building connects with bold, brownish, brickwork buildings in the village. We were fascinated by a brewery with an industrial tower at the main square of the village. The brewery showed us how well the friction of different scales could work there. Moreover, the small tower of the building acts as a 'campanile' adjacent to the existing modest town hall; thus, resulting in a pair of buildings creating a density of publicness. The space in between acts like a small Italian square or passage."
