Uitbreiding Sint-Sixtusabdij

The archetypical form of the cloister or claustrum, the original example of a spatial unfolding of collective living around a courtyard, demonstrates how the relationship between inside and outside is made meaningful by linking it to circulation. This was the challenge that the architects wanted to take up for the expansion of the St Sixtus Abbey. The architects wanted to maintain the essence of the historical type: the monastery with a cloister in combination with a complex, contemporary programme. They did not look for a fresh typology, but reduced the new addition to the essence of the primal type.

The existing monastery complex boasts two churches: a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic parish church and, at right angles to it, the 1968 abbey church by Arthur Degeyter, a closed, brick volume with a striking trapezoidal roof structure through which daylight enters from above. The new extension keeps its distance from the abbey church (at the request of the Department of Monuments) and is connected only by a corridor. This forms a deliberate breach between old and new. The old parish church is being given a new use as refectory and library. The extension adjoins the old parish church as a monastic square. The ground floor around the cloister includes such collective spaces as the chapter house, scriptorium and infirmary. Twenty-seven separate rooms are situated upstairs. The enclosed garden is the pivotal element.

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