VDAB Training Center in Kortrijk, Belgium by van Belle & Medina Architects

Article source: van Belle & Medina Architects

The industrial zone of Menen a Belgian city located close to the French border is surrounded by the characteristic landscape of the country’s southern areas, a markedly horizontal scenery of greens and ochers where farming and livestock exploitations coexist with small factories. It is into this context that the new VDAB facility inserts itself like just another component of the landscape. Its new Logistics and Training Center is a building surrounded by three hectares of strips for driving a wide range of heavy vehicles.

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

• Architects: van Belle & Medina Architects
• Project: VDAB Training Center
• Location: Kortrijk, Belgium
• Client: VDAB
• Completion year: 2011

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Unlike the majority of industrial constructions which tend to be raised with prefabricated light materials the building has a solid and permanent look about it. After all, it is also intended to have a public representational use. Designed as a stone wall of sorts, its envelope presents two facades of steel glass, and two others facades these much longer, stretching more than 100 meters – built with prefabricated concrete panels that make the building look serene but also heterogeneous, with a texture that changes in expression according to the momentary quality of light, in the process becoming something resembling a vibrant kaleidoscope. This petrous volume contains a large diaphanous space four meters wide within it, with a grid of skylights for a lid that lets the ever-changing sunlight shine through all day long.

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Image Courtesy © van Belle & Medina Architects

Tags: Belgium, Kortrijk

Category: Training centre

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