Antwerp: Heritage and innovation
Veronica Simpson investigates Antwerp, a city that has thrown off decades of neglect
Antwerp has been one of the world’s largest ports since the Middle Ages and is still ranked Europe’s number two. Those centuries of trading in textiles, spices and diamonds – where it still ranks number one – are clearly translated into its bricks and mortar, evident in the pick and mix layers of architecture visible along each street, especially in the centre, where tall and skinny modernist townhouses sit alongside Venetian-inspired medieval merchants' mini palazzi.
Carved stone embellishments are juxtaposed with flat ceramics facades; rendered concrete frontages in tones ranging from grey through green to lemon yellow butt up against rich Belgian brick of all shades – black, ochre, terracotta. Nothing looks like it was planned to be next to anything else, but everything somehow fits. And where the city has more space around the docks – either due to wartime bombardment or the relocation of the port’s main business away from the centre – repurposed warehouses and statement contemporary structures coexist companionably, communicating a thirst for the new alongside respect for the old. Although the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing lockdowns and post-lockdown measures will have undoubtedly impacted on the freedom with which its citizens circulate in concert halls and markets, this city has weathered worse storms, both biological and economic, over the centuries. And when activity returns, the uniting factor that knits the city together visually and culturally will no doubt prevail: and that is a prevailing sense of good taste.
From architecture and interiors to graphic design, Antwerp folk clearly have an ‘eye’. Centuries of the finest artistic and intellectual endeavour have undoubtedly contributed to such aesthetic intelligence. Thanks to the money that flowed into Antwerp through its dominance of spice and silk trading as well as cloth manufacture, wealthy merchants whose fortunes bloomed in the 16th and 17th centuries became eager patrons of the arts, nourishing the talents of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) and Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641). Every rich merchant needs a library, and such zeal for learning helped the city’s great 16th-century scholar, Christophe Plantin, to establish Antwerp as a centre of excellence for printing and engraving, and his printing works, now the Plantin-Moretus Museum, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In my view, you can see that visual and cultural intelligence in the commissioning of one of Zaha Hadid’s most interesting, contextually sympathetic buildings – the Port House – which balances a crazy, diamond-patterned glass bauble of an office building on top of a historic fire house with great panache. You can also see an equal but different flair – quieter and more refined – in the insertion of a subtly luxurious new hotel, The August, into a 19h-century former convent.
Within five heritage, listed buildings once occupied by nuns – who tended the military’s sick and wounded at the adjacent hospital – Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen has done a wonderful job of creating his first hotel, for local hotelier Mouche Van Hool. Van Hool has already demonstrated her flair for hospitality as well as design with the Hotel Julien in the city centre. She spotted an opportunity for a sister establishment in 2014, when a planned redevelopment was announced for this eight hectare site, whose extensive 19th-century Military Hospital and convent had lain unused for more than four decades. Now the whole hospital/cloisters campus is billed as the Green Quarter (Het Groen Kwartier), designed as a family-friendly, car-free neighbourhood, with walking and bike routes and lots of open green space throughout the refurbished and new buildings – the new being mostly social, rented and affordable apartments and townhouses.
The facilities are arranged around walled gardens. Image Credit: Robert Rieger
To weave life throughout this new quarter, there is also a bakery, a co-working space, an advertising agency, and a cluster of interesting, industrial chic studios and bars/eateries around the back of The August. This is slow regeneration at its best, as the scheme has emerged in inspired stages over the past four years, since the gem at its core – a Michelin-starred restaurant, The Jane – first opened in 2015, with a remarkable interiors scheme by Dutch interiors star Piet Boon (as I flagged up in a feature for FX at the time).
Antwerp-based Van Duysen is one of Belgium’s finest, and his stock has risen steadily since the 1990s thanks to the elegantly modern private houses, offices and showrooms he has created, as well as desirable items he has authored for the likes of Molteni&C, Dada, Kvadrat, Paola Lenti, Olivari, B&B Italia, and Flos. He had, however, resisted all previous invitations to turn his talents to hospitality, until he saw the quality and character of the original convent buildings (see The August Hotel case study).
The whole Green Quarter development is admirable, given the way the new buildings complement and contrast with the old, and how the whole scheme adds new landscaping, plus walking and cycling routes for the enrichment of both residents and the locals. And that considerate approach to planning seems to permeate the city. But it wasn’t always this way, according to Valerie Van de Velde, coordinator of knowledge exchange for the Antwerp regeneration team (atelier Stadsbouwmeester). She says that after the docks were moved north of the city in the 1970s, those who lived more centrally fled to the quieter, leafier suburbs while planners continued to kill the character and diversity of the older and industrial areas thanks to the prevailing popularity of ill-advised, mid-century zoning schemes, which prioritised the car. It was the city’s artists and architect activists who drew attention to the great qualities and character of the historic centre and the riverscape, she says, with ‘happenings’ – demonstrations against car-centric development, and towards waterfront improvement, in a campaign called ‘stop by the stream’. Van de Velde continues: ‘Antwerp’s architects, urbanists, artists and citizens wanted to do something with the river. In 1989 they organised an international design competition. [Japanese architect] Toyo Ito made a plan for the new south and redevelopment of the old railway site and the former quays. Rem Koolhas was involved.
They made plans. But at the time the politicians were not ready. They were still doing land-use planning. But there was a really strong movement from civil society.’ All this energy coalesced in the programme developed by director Eric Antonis for Antwerp’s 1993 role as European Capital of Culture. Central to an extraordinary array of diverse musical, theatrical, artistic and cultural activities was the launch of Antwerp Open City, which activated dialogue between the campaigning architects, urbanists and citizens about the way they would like to see their city evolve. In tandem with these events and debates, theatre groups – foremost among them Royal De Luxe, the French mechanical marionette street theatre company – staged performances that drew thousands to the neglected quarters to help reimagine them. That included a floating ‘Ark’, a theatre-barge that hosted young theatre troupes from 15 European cities who were each invited to live, work and perform on the boat for a week. The €22m budget for that cultural extravaganza also included the renovation of many of the city’s finest historic buildings, including the 18th-century Bourla Theatre.
SimpsonHaugh won the competition to remodel the concert hall. Image Credit: Karen Fuchs
But perhaps it was also Antonis’s wider humanist and philosophical enquiry, in his theme of ‘can art save the world?’ that seems to have triggered the tolerance, creativity and diversity apparent in the city today. In the Belgian election of the early 1990s that preceded the Capital of Culture festival, one in four Antwerp citizens had voted for Vlaams Blok, an extreme right-wing nationalist party whose policies included repatriation for all immigrants.
According to The Independent ‘the city appeared to many to be the fascist face of benign Belgium’ in the year before the newspaper’s article was published in 1993. That certainly no longer appears to be the case, judging by the handsome and civic Atlas Centre – a 2006 project by Antwerp architects META and an orientation and integration hub offering help with accommodation, language and jobs for new arrivals from all over the globe – which I stumbled across near the station. And that inclusive spirit was endorsed by Danish fashion designer Abelone Wilhelmsen and Spanish footwear designer Caro Peirs, who greeted me as I browsed the inspirational sustainable fashion store EDO Collective. Both have lived and studied in various European cities, including London, but ‘feel most at home’ in Antwerp.
That eclectic spirit is also evident in the annual digital arts festival I dropped in on, UsByNight, which has garnered a growing audience among digital natives populating the worlds of branding and advertising. With an anticipated 3,000 daily visitors over its three nights, even an evening of typically drenching Belgian rain couldn’t deter the crowds as they dodged the puddles on the way to this cavernous concrete, dockside venue.
Antwerp is clearly a city doing something right – and it hasn’t finished yet. Van de Velde tells me of schemes to open up more of the riverfront with large urban parks, as well as to cover a local motorway with a tunnel – to minimise pollution for residents in the surrounding neighbourhoods – over the roof of which an urban park will be planted. If it continues to provide opportunity and support for its citizens of all hues – and nourish the creativity thriving within its walls – there is much Antwerp can teach the rest of the world.
Case Study
The August Hotel
When Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen agreed to transform a historic, listed convent, its cloisters, chapels and assorted buildings into a 44-room hotel, one of the biggest problems was how to unite the five existing structures in ways that made sense, but which also took advantage of all the rich heritage. His response was to arrange the facilities around three walled gardens, two of which are accessible either from the restaurant/ bar or rooms, and one of which has been turned into a reed-filtered pond, where you can swim and take advantage of the private sauna and steam and spa facilities situated in the ground and basement floor of the adjacent building.
The former chapel has been turned into a bar. Image Credit: Robert Rieger
The 44 bedrooms have been concentrated in one wing, where the nuns used to sleep, along with the restaurant kitchen, meeting rooms and a calm and spacious guests’ library. The high-ceilinged, white-painted bedrooms are far from cell-like, and are enriched with dark-wood floors, sage joinery, huge white beds, and white-tiled bathrooms. Simplicity as well as luxury are communicated in the generous sweep of floor-to-ceiling curtains and the quality of materials.
New elements resonate with the building’s past, such as skinny black metal lampstands with their wimple-like white shades. The material palette – predominantly marble, ceramic and wood – is consistent across the scheme, uniting the past with the present.
There is very little colour other than the sage joinery, neutral handwoven rugs and rattan ottomans, and the stylish green staff uniforms by Belgian designer Christian Wijnants.
The only exception for colour – and the only flash of pattern – is in the original ceramic floor tiles. Van Duysen, who has designed extensively for Molteni&C, Kvadrat and Flos, has been able to use his own pieces strategically throughout, further unifying the visual language.
White has been used repeatedly within the project. Image Credit: Robert Rieger
He has also designed cupboard systems and door handles as ‘archetypal’ elements. The sanitary fittings are from a range he designed for Fantini Rubinetti. Cutlery is also by him, and available – along with other supremely tasteful elements – from the shop, which he has set into an existing building across the way from the hotel entrance, along with an informal cafe that any of the residents from the surrounding townhouses and apartments can use.
While the reed-filtered pool set into its own private spa courtyard is remarkable, it’s the chapel now turned into a bar that gives the hotel its wow factor. Visible beyond the sleek and understated reception, its huge vintage-glass windows and displays of liqueurs and glassware add dazzle during the day, while the dark furniture and black ceiling make it even more dramatic by night. The adjacent restaurant has been inserted into a corridor alongside the chapel, with large windows looking onto the covered walkway that connects the convent to the hospital campus, now converted into housing, and extends into the adjacent ‘winter garden’.
Client Mouche Van Hool
Architecture and interior design Vincent van Duysen
Restoration architect Wouter Callebaut Architect
Opened Spring 2019
Consultants Wirtz International Landscape Architects (landscape design)
Case Study
Queen Elisabeth Concert Hall
While Antwerp – and Belgium in general – boasts many fine architecture practices of its own, UK practice SimpsonHaugh won the competition to remodel a 1950s concert hall set within a complex of historic buildings, thanks to its inspired proposal both to insert a world-class concert hall within the complex but also to create delightful new public spaces for the city.
The Elisabeth Centre is a historic civic complex close to Antwerp’s Central Station, and next to the famous Antwerp Zoo, but its inadequate and outdated facilities meant it was underused. By removing the underperforming, fan-shaped 1950s hall, SimpsonHaugh was able to insert a new, elongated ‘shoebox’-configured 2,000-seater auditorium, developed together with US acoustician Larry Kirkegaard, into the first floor, which freed up space on the ground floor as well as around the auditorium and its art nouveau envelope.
Curved oak and walnut panels, plus bronze, mesh balcony fronts, feature in the hall. Image Credit: Jonas Verhulst
A soaring atrium has been added into that space, creating a sequence of richly textured, naturally lit public rooms that revel in the rich ornamentation of the restored original building – and respond in kind with the auditorium’s exterior cladding of light-reflecting, diamond-shaped, patinated metal shingles in gold, silver and bronze; the diagonal grid in which they are laid references tiled cupolas found elsewhere in the city.
In fact, all the materials, textures and detailing of the scheme were inspired by Antwerp’s historic buildings, with their rich ornamentation, and the city’s legendary fashion, textile and gem history. Inside, the auditorium conjures a feeling of warmth and handcrafted-ness, with curved oak and walnut panels that control sound reflections, and sumptuous, bronze, mesh ceiling and balcony fronts designed to maintain acoustic transparency. A mesh-clad canopy above the platform is adjustable, to optimise the acoustics for a range of different musical configurations.
Subsequent to the 2009 competition win, the architects were invited to expand their remit to integrate state-of-the-art conference facilities, which take advantage of the concert hall, thereby multiplying the benefits and uses of the scheme.
Open staircases connect the atrium to the upper foyers. Image Credit: Jonas Verhulst
Restored historic rooms off the atrium plus new, purpose-built halls at ground and first floor multiply the possible scales and formats for conferences and seminars. Open staircases connect the atrium to the upper foyers, so that the flow of people adds to the animation within the building, while the main staircase is oriented to offer visual links between the venue and the adjacent zoo, in its extensive, landscaped gardens.
Thus, the scheme creates a world-class new home for the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, a valuable business tourism attraction for the city, and makes the most of its unique placement offering, as practice founder and director Ian Simpson has quipped: ‘A room with a zoo.’
It has won multiple international awards and nominations, including international finalist for the 2019 Civic Trust Award, and winner of the 2018 MSA Project of the Year.
Client City of Antwerp
Architecture SimpsonHaugh
Area 28,000m2
Completed Late 2017
Case Study
Tim Van Laere Gallery
Each concrete block is a singular but connecting space. Image Credit: Tim Van Laere Gallery
Antwerp’s contemporary art scene is thriving, judging by the prosperous-looking commercial galleries that fill the city centre, the increasing popularity of the Antwerp Art Weekend, and the confidence and scale of Tim Van Laere’s new gallery space. Van Laere started out at the age of 27 with a one-room space in the city’s residential Zuid district. Two decades later, he has opened a 10,700ft2, free-standing space on the banks of the Scheldt, in the half-constructed Nieuw Zuid, a brand new sustainable and low-impact neighbourhood on Antwerp’s south-west edge. Van Laere had always nurtured an ambition to design his own gallery from the ground up. He wanted a space that would communicate the principles of ‘accessibility and independence’, which have governed his own practice as a gallerist. He spotted the work of Brussels-based Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, where they had designed the Belgian Pavilion. He liked their tendency to ‘reduce architecture to its very essence’, he has said, and commissioned them to create his new gallery.
Five differently sized blocks of pale pastel concrete are concertinaed closely together, their brute simplicity and variegated heights and widths reminiscent of both the eclectic Flemish streetscapes and the minimalist sculptural offerings of Donald Judd. Each block is a singular but connecting space: at the far end, a storage space topped by a roof terrace; then a ‘house’ with office and meeting space; two large, high-ceilinged galleries; plus a smaller one for emerging artists. The scheme sits within a landscape that doubles up as sculpture garden.
One of the high-ceilinged galleries. Image Credit: Tim Van Laere Gallery
Daylight flows in via a glazed strip set into the top of each north-facing wall, exploiting the shifting roof levels. The high-ceilinged main galleries feel both spacious and solid. Details are kept to a minimum, though one of the main galleries – nicknamed ‘the chapel’ – benefits from an angled arch in its roof. Each street-facing cuboid elevation is interrupted by a single, decisive, door or window aperture, adding to the impression of a sober envelope, serving as elegant foil to the expressiveness of the art within. The only frivolous note in the whole enterprise is a feature colour of sickly pink that is Van Laere’s signature hue – inspired by the trademark pink used by one of the most famous artists on his roster, Franz West. While this crane-festooned new quarter is still far from finished, already this new art space has spawned a couple of imitators in the adjacent blocks, giving credence to its claim of being the new contemporary cultural quarter.
Client Tim Van Laere
Architects Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen
Area 10,700ft2
Completed Spring 2019
Case Study
Edo Collective
When the pop-up’s lease expires in 2020 it will be dismantled and opened elsewhere in Antwerp. Image Credit: Anais Stoelen Photography
Just around the corner from Antwerp’s legendary Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which has nurtured some of Belgium’s finest fashion designers, is an enterprising pop-up that aims to showcase a different, more sustainable, 21st-century approach to both fashion design and retail. EDO Collective is the brainchild of Veerle Spaepen, who had previously spent 10 years working for the Belgian government promoting the circular economy, and tried out a couple of sustainable fashion initiatives of her own.
Through this, she realised a growing number of Belgian designers were already working to eliminate the wasteful and toxic practices of fast fashion, but struggling to find a footing in retail. Having secured funds from the Belgian government’s circular economy programme, in summer 2019 she took out a year-long, short-life lease on the ground floor of a building due for demolition.
Together with project manager Lien de Grom and 10 designers they opened the EDO Collective, which has now grown to accommodate 30 different collections, including interiors, stationery and accessories. With a minimal budget of €20,000 the team stripped back and repainted the original office space, and asked a carpenter friend to create a coffee bar and a range of flexible display furniture. That budget also included computers, software and some minor renovation work. Says Spaepen: ‘We wanted a warm, minimal design for ourselves. We used low lighting, red accents and wood. We had to be minimalist because if we used too much colour it could clash with the identity of the designers. We worked with people who know how to steer the customer journey through the store. The challenge is finding a balance between our look and feel and the look and feel of the brand.’ Furniture and fittings, as you would imagine, have good eco credentials: the lamps are by More Circular, made from recycled gypsum, and the tables are of wood felled as part of Antwerp’s parks clearance (and are by Stadshout, which translates as ‘citywood’).
Over the ensuing months, Spaepen has fine-tuned the business model to be as sustainable as possible, both for the designers and as a retail enterprise. There is an ‘inner circle’ of locally based designers, who pay a monthly fee, which goes down if they offer skills or presence in-store, and an ‘outer circle’ of brands that are on-message in terms of sustainability, but may come from further away in the region.
‘Being in a collective, there’s a lot of friendship here and a group feeling’. Image Credit: Anais Stoelen Photography
The presence of the designers themselves in the store is a key part of the experience – not just to explain the principles of circular or sustainable design by which each brand stands, but also as support for each other.
Says Spaepen: ‘We live in a time where retail is a weapon of mass destruction. These young designers always start with a lot of passion but if you want to engage with the high street, the pressure on speed, quantity and price kills all the passion. The second pillar of the model is keeping the passion alive through connection, exchange of knowledge, and by being there, all together all the time. All the designers are solo entrepreneurs; it’s really lonely sometimes. Being in a collective, there’s a lot of friendship here and a group feeling – it really helps to keep them motivated.’
When the pop-up’s lease expires in summer 2020 Spaepen and her crew will be dismantling the shop and opening elsewhere in Antwerp, but also eyeing up prospects in Brussels and further afield.
Client, design and construction Veerle Spaepen and EDO Collective
Budget €20,000
Lamps More Circular morecircular.com
Tables Stadshout stadshout.be
Chairs Omarcity omarcity.world
Carpentry Luc Luyckx
Floorplan Sophie Peelman
