Headquarters of the Flamand Brabant Government

Extending urban life into the workspace

Along the train platform, an artificial valley, a new centrality was planned in the historical city limits. The Headquarters of the Flamand Brabant Government are a central piece in this plan.
The main elevation, the tower elevation, marks the point where the Circular Boulevard touches the the train platform valley exactly in the end of Justus Lipsius street. In front of the tower a public square, clearly belonging to the building connects it with the city public space.
This square, along with a long suspended wall, facing the trains, responds to the particular urban and infrastructural site conditions.
The square is linked with the public ground floor of the building, some seven meters above the trains and extends to the garden on the other end of the building. Interior and exterior spaces are mixed by the introduction of courtyards, open to the train and linked to each other by means of the transparency that caracterizes the interior spaces at this level. The limits between public and private space are blurred, creating an hibrid condition, more complex, that caracterizes the habitable space inside and outside the building.
The ground floor is conceived as an urban anonymous landscape, where transparency and opacity will be an ever changing background, responsive to light and use conditions, that interacts with the intimate courtyard environment. A space where people encounter each other in an always different background, a countinuous mineral ground, the “natural” landscape of the courtyards with dense folliage, the abstract movement of the trains, or just the sky variation.
The transparency was not an obsession in this building. The ambition was the creation of an environment where people could chose their own way to relate with others, their own environment, since the more introspect and reflexive isolation to vast and profound panoramas. A work space is above all a place for diferent ways, preferences and attitudes.
If this conditions are not satisfied, a flexible space, obtained by means of complex technological means, becames highly questionable.

Photography by: Andre Nullens

Source: Mies Arch Prize: http://www.miesarch.com/