'Heliport'
six towers & a plinth

team Marie Nevejan (BE), Lorenzo Fante (IT), Joaquín Carrasco (CL), Felix Redmann (AT)
mentor Michael Klein | summer school in Gent | 2019

Located close to Bruxelles Nord Station, the situation in Avenue de l’Héliport is defined by a surrounding that programmatically and socially is rich in contrasts and a social housing company that is confronted with an ever-growing waiting list for apartments, reflecting Brussels’ dire needs for living space. Six residential towers weight on a plinth – the podium – which currently serves as a car parking covered by an open space which can only described as monotonous, dysfunctional and cut off from the city. 

The project takes up the challenge to provide more affordable housing on the site through a step-by-step conversion of the slabs towards more collective forms of living. A series of everyday-life practices are sourced out of the apartment and moved down, where they are complemented by further urban programs. A continuous structural grid provides a spatial framework and gives architectural specificity resulting less in a definite building, but rather in a field of possibilities to constantly re-organize the programmatic instability that constitutes the urban.

(c) Felix Redmann 2022