Thornsett Group

Little and Large

When it comes to architecture, Belgium’s city landscapes are dotted with flashes of ingenuity.
And as the Sculp(IT) Tower in Antwerp and Leopold Village in
Brussels demonstrate, great design comes in all shapes and sizes.

“It was love at first sight,” says Pieter Peerlings as he sits in Antwerp’s narrowest building, which – coincidentally – he designed with his partner Silvia Mertens. The young architects have lived and worked in their extraordinary creation, the Sculp(IT) Tower, for the last three years. Designed from scratch by Peerlings and Mertens, it looks – in its neon-lit, night-time glory – a bit like a beautifully designed brothel. Albeit one without any punters or, erm, service providers. “I passed an empty space one morning which was advertised for sale,” explains Peerlings.
“I was up for a challenge so I picked up the phone and bought the land. The design only took us five minutes.” Since then, the four-storey brick-and-glass tower, which measures just 6 metres² per floor, has drawn in crowds of locals, tourists and peeping toms.
There’s no fille de joie here but visitors can still catch glimpses of a different type of nudity. Walls are stripped of their plaster to reveal gritty textures, the steel beams of its skeletal structure and a back wall of tempered glass – this is architecture in the raw.
And the lights? “The lights are a joke,” Peerlings explains, “in honour of the nearby red-light district.” There is no overarching theme: “It’s really just a matter of taste and more space. It’s our own take on naked architecture – using materials as they are without covering or adorning them. It’s not minimalist.” Peerlings ponders for a moment. “Actually, it’s more romantic because it plays with textures and it’s what we consider comfortable to live in.”

Little has changed at the Sculp(IT) Tower since it was unveiled in 2008 – all the rooms remain bare to the point of functionality. Nodding to the window in the bedroom, Peerlings notes: “Actually, we’ve added a curtain here – Silvia can’t sleep with the light coming in. Otherwise, it’s all the same.” Next to the metal loo the bedside table glints, sparkling new. The showerhead on the ceiling is only inches away from the bed and an exposed clothes rail. Noticing my bafflement,
Peerlings says: “Things don’t get wet as long as you don’t do any…” he pauses for a Head and- Shoulders moment, swishing his hair in slow motion. “We like the ‘non-standard’ and so do our clients. At the moment we’re working on a robot-run pharmacy.”
He then climbs through a submarine porthole onto the rooftop where a bathtub is set into the pallet-floor. “We never intended this to be a solution to urban overcrowding; but maybe it’s a solution if people’s minds get used to it.” He peers over to next-door’s rooftop: “On the other hand, our next aim is to see whether we can buy out our neighbour’s roof to make a garden. Now, that would be pretty cool.”
The European Quarter has seldom been blessed with outstanding architecture. The scramble to provide office space for the ever expanding institutions means that quality has never been a high priority. But the newly opened Leopold Village development, just behind the unlovely Justus Lipsius building, could be the start of some smart new urban thinking. The complex was built by the Irish developer Thornsett, a London-based company with a small Brussels outpost. It stands on a sloping site directly above the Belliard road tunnel, facing the Place Jean Rey with its quirky fountains. Interesting concept, but would anyone want to live in such a tricky urban area?
Thornsett thought so. After an open competition they appointed the Brussels architect Pierre Blondel to design an entire city block that would contain 108 apartments, a 150-room hotel and several shops and restaurants. Blondel is an imaginative young architect who creates irregular- shaped buildings decorated with bold colour schemes. So goodbye to the safe tones of grey and brown that Belgians have traditionally favoured in their new buildings. Because of its location above a tunnel, the project called for serious structural engineering.
The main apartment block facing the Place Jean Rey is supported on massive concrete columns that poke through some of the apartments.
The apartments come in all sizes, from little studios for one tidy person to luxurious penthouse dwellings spread over three floors. The penthouses have spectacular views over the Parc Léopold and the European Parliament, but they don’t come cheap, ranging from €800,000 to over €1million.
Eoghan Quinn, commercial director of Thornsett in Belgium, doesn’t think they are overpriced. “A similar property in London would cost around seven million to eight million euros,” he explains. “You have the EU institutions on your doorstep here, along with two large parks.”
Expensive or not, these places are selling fast. Something like
65 percent of the apartments have been sold already, of which about one-third have been snapped up by buy-to let investors. “Quite a lot have been bought by foreigners,” says Quinn, “which is understandable, given that the EU institutions are close, but a fair number have gone to Belgians, who have a family house outside Brussels but want to return to the city.”
The hotel is run by the Starwood Group and is the first of its Aloft brand to open in Europe.
“Starwood chose Brussels because it has a reputation for design,” explains the Dutch hotel manager Coen van Niersen.
I like it. You might not. It’s a cool urban place decorated with vivid colours and exposed metal pipes. They have a DJ playing on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, board games and a breakfast area called re:fuel.
But whatever you think of it, Leopold Village is certainly different from the dull EU Quarter office buildings put up by developers in the
1970s. Finally, the European District has something interesting to look at.