Transformation of M.I.F – Maison des Initatives de Forest

Description: Competition
Type of project: Competition
Type of customer: Public
Department: Competition
Location: Forest, Brussels 
Surface area: 1200 m²
Year: 2021

The project, innovative, exemplary and sustainable in its materialisation, presents a flexible and modular structure to allow for great resilience and to adapt the programming according to changing needs. The preservation of the built context, the dialogue with the Wiels surroundings as well as the integration in the morphology of the existing templates promote coherence with regard to the lace formed by the division of solids and voids of the façade templates of the block concerned.

The location and visibility of the Maison des Initiatives is of paramount importance and is a challenge for the revitalisation of the Wiels district. It is a question of making this crossroads a place of passage but also a place of destination, inserting the project into a coherent public space, favouring soft mobility and qualifying the public spaces, making the direct surroundings of the crossroads permeable and green.

The project provides for a real forecourt that participates in the appropriation of the public space, its greening and thus offers welcoming outdoor spaces.

The conservation of part of the endemic vegetation will be the starting point for the composition of the garden.

The valorization of various elements of demolition that can be recovered is done by a preliminary inventory, which translates one of our central desires which is to preserve a maximum of the structures and elements of decoration and to emphasize the existing heritage.