Upcycling an outdated office into affordable housing and a daycare

Our Pavillon project upcycles a former office building into a mixed-used ensemble comprising 41 affordable apartments and a daycare facility. The project was commissioned by Inclusio, a socially engaged private investor focused on bringing a response to the affordable housing crisis in Belgium as well as to the shortage of some local public services.

The former occupant, an education related public administration, decided to relocate, leaving behind an infrastructure at odds with its surroundings. It was unsuited for a contemporary office function and, close to the railway as it was, poorly located in regard of the new sustainable mobility strategies. 

The neighbourhood itself is in a process of revitalisation, with a publicly sponsored initiative - a « contrat de quartier » - breathing new energies into it. Though privately funded, our project fits perfectly within the objectives of the « contrat de quartier » as it brings life and new services to a street challenged by the presence of raised railway tracks along one of its sides.

The office building had a 55 meter long monotonous grid façade and a uniform distribution of functions, with the ground floor barely differentiated from the upper floors. It felt important to us to break this monotony in order to introduce liveliness, warmth and variety in the façade as well as in the apartment typologies. 

The apartments are all accessible by the retrofitted central vertical core, thus minimising energy consuming structural alterations while maximising functionality and flexibility on the ground floor, allowing it to host other uses in the future than the original daycare facility. From the vertical core, the distribution of the apartments is achieved by a central corridor on one side and an exterior passageway on the other, resulting into a rich variety of single-sided and double-sided layouts, further enhanced by a mix of studios, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments.

The inversion of the circulations also provides the opportunity to enliven the façade with a large expressive void animated by protruding cantilevered passageways. Along the passageways, the glazed fronts of the apartments are setback to give room to a semi-private front porch acting as a privacy guarding filter while also enabling informal encounters between neighbours. The boundary between the porches and the passageways is signified by randomly spaced unobtrusive vertical slats, a nonaggressive code allowing users to show equal respect for the private and the shared areas of the space.

On the ground floor, the opportunities offered by the programme are seized to enliven the public realm. The main entrance of the apartments, the hallway of the daycare facility, some of the playrooms and the caretaker’s cafeteria all participate in this animation.

In keeping with a long-standing urban tradition, the front façade is more elaborate than the rear one. While the latter is soberly white cemented, colour-mixed slates form the main skin of the apartments in the front, bringing a new energy and a vibrancy to this formerly neglected portion of the street. Contrasting in tone and scale, light-coloured fibre-cement panels underscore the ground floor functions and the voids, thus accentuating the legibility of the new composition.