Kanal - Centre Pompidou

Bookshop and reading hall at KANAL Centre Pompidou, Brussels

More than a museum, the Kanal project is a real public space, which re-enacts pre-established cultural cartographies. Celebrating the urban at its most inclusive, the project invites us to think of the bookshop and the reading room as a space in its own right. The relatively small size of these spaces, located on the Piano Nobile of the former garage, offers a unique condition to create a place where the notion of comfort, refuge and a certain domesticity can prevail. While playing on this idea of a permanently open public space, we feel it is necessary to awaken the user’s sensitive perception and reinforce his physical inclusion in a reading room with a particular character: between a public square and the intimacy of a living room.