Learning from Corporate architecture

"Learning from Corporate Architecture" has chosen to focus on a specific district that has long been neglected by architectural culture, yet is an archetype in itself of a series of operations that have shaped the city of Brussels since the second half of the twentieth century; the North Quarter and its corporate architecture of office buildings, banks and hotels is an extremely specific district of the city of Brussels beyond the generic image of the business district.

Learning from Classics is part of a dynamic (series) of reflections set up by CENTRAL, Maxime Delvaus and occasionally Sophie Dars for several years on the question of the tenuous, perceptible or imperceptible, link that architecture maintains with its context and the making of the city. All these reflections are interested in the question of the missing link between architecture and urbanism and in the expression of the collective values of certain projects within the city itself. The challenge is to identify virtuous urban situations and to reveal their potential in order to propose an extrapolation in a synthetic form. These extrapolations, once isolated from their contexts, take on a certain form of 'universality' and can therefore be used as a project tool. These situations are generally the result of an assembly of intentions of which the city is made, they can be intended or inherited, anodyne or spectacular, architectural or not.... Each chosen context constitutes for us a pool of potential projects with its own particularities and specificities. We have to learn from what exists, from what is already there, from what has been and from what already works without always knowing why.