Exhibition Hall BRUSK in Bruges, Belgium

On a site on the Garenmarkt, next to the Groeningemuseum in the city of Bruges, the new exhibition hall will house two museum spaces and will open out onto a new park. The exhibition areas are constructed at a raised level and will be separated from each other by a public passageway, so that an open, transparent and freely accessible ground level will be created. This ground level will be given over in its entirety to the city, its inhabitants and its visitors. The exterior of BRUSK will be completely covered in textured and electricity generating glass ‘scales’, which will provide the building with a sustainable form of energy.

At the request of the City of Bruges, the exhibition areas will be sufficiently spacious to accommodate international travelling exhibitions of both classical and contemporary works. However, the exhibition rooms will also be designed with sufficient flexibility, so that they can be divided up into smaller spaces to allow a number of exhibitions, performances or other events to take place at the same time. BRUSK’s exhibition rooms will stand out in the museum landscape, not only by virtue of their sublime natural fall of light (from the north side, as was usually the case in the great artistic workshops of the past), but also because of their unique height of 13,75 metres (making them reminiscent of a church or cathedral). In this way, BRUSK breaks with the trend of most museums and exhibition spaces, which tend to avoid making use of natural light, preferring to rely almost exclusively on its electric alternative.