The building site, situated parallel to the railroad tracks of the Leuven train station, is in many ways remarkable. It’s located within walking distance to the station, which is undergoing large scale developments, but it also seamlessly connects to the smaller scale residential area of ‘Klein Rijsel’.
The client’s ambition was to build a large amount of social housing as well as private homes, both with underground parking, surrounded by a collective garden accessible to the public. This wasn’t an easy task as the topography of the site, as well as the urban plan ‘BPA Westelijke Spoorweggeul’, imposed certain parameters and limitations to the site.
ABSIII is the third time our office was asked to design an interior for Absoluut, an advertising agency based in Louvain. This project was conceived i.c.w. architect Tom Huycke. The space is located in the Remy tower, a former factory in Wijgmaal.
The office is situated on the 5th floor. It is made up of two entities: a lounge area adjacent to a bar and the reception desk which acts as an informal workspace, and the actual office with different spaces according to the different needs.
The volume of the house is partially pushed in the natural slope of the terrain resulting in a front facade that is limited in height. The addition of a long horizontal window (fenêtre en longeur) between ground and first floor gives the house a certain lightness as it seems to almost float above its base. As a result, the house stands modestly against the backdrop of the landscape.
Thus half buried in the natural slope of the terrain, the day zone is situated on the garden floor, the night zone and entrance on the street side. The resulting volume is a direct translation of the program.
The project consists of a renovation of a historic mansion in Leuven (Belgium) of which the main focus is enhancing life quality and reorganizing living on the ground floor. A new extension is realized, supported by steel trusses, a sort of lightfilled city-cabin. In the historic mansion furniture is introduced in the existing carriage-corridor, as a way of mediation with the oversized corridor and practical organization of a few smaller functions in to a dense cluster.
Dieter Vander Velpen Architects remodelled a 70’s house near the Belgian town of Leuven, to create a new kitchen and bathroom for the owners, with clean lines but a warm material palette including bronze, Walnut veneer, Travertine and Calacatta marble.
In order to achieve a beautifully bordered off station square, an area of 210 m² was conceded between the signal box and the underpass of the ring road in order to build a building of 6m x 35m x 16.5m high.
Since the footprint was too narrow to accommodate the programme of a fully-fledged bank office, we conceived a 10m overhang on the first floor. This design immediately radiates the architectural force of the building, which has been built exclusively in clear and black enamelled glass with vertical uprights around the 2 highest floors. As a result, the internal functions are discretely shielded from the context.
Station neighborhoods are prominent meeting places and urban anchors within a city. They are potential impulses which can activate cities towards a stronger metropolis. There where the heartbeats of arriving and departing, sojourning and saying farewell, the skyline is the silhouette of a station’s neighbourhood, a fact that stays in your memory as a traveller.
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