Keukentoren Elishout

Xaveer de Geyter’s project for a higher education institute for workers in the hospitality industries takes the programme – eight training kitchens for future cooks – as a pretext for a building that presents itself as a marker, or a signpost, in the infrastructural landscape. The ‘kitchen tower’ is attached to an existing campus of three, four and five storey buildings arranged in open, landscaped courtyards. Rather than seeking a continuation of this pattern, which provides a fairly civilised environment in which to wander, the new building is approached axially. It is a destination that sets itself apart. The concept of the tower is quite simple: the kitchens are stacked one on top of the other, with two emergency staircases on the west and north sides, and a series of four shafts facing the motorway, one of which contains the goods lift. The pattern of a core that serves any number of floors is thus reversed. Volumetrically, the building emerges as a diagrammatic extrusion of the footprint. The exceptions provide the arrangements for the entrance at the bottom and the double-height panoramic restaurant at the top.

Author: Christoph Grafe. This text has been published in the Architecture Review Flanders N°11. Embedded Architecture.