At Tour & Taxis, a sustainable village where it will never rain

"This project, covering four hectares (140 meters wide and 280 meters long) is unique. It is also the largest wooden office complex in Europe… but not only"says architect Willem-Jan Neutelings. The abandoned hall of the freight station is slowly turning into a pleasant covered village where it will never rain.

L adds: "It's a lot more than renovating an old building. division into ten roughly identical office modulesit remains a project on a human scale. Each module has its own entrance door. Offices, with ceilings four meters high, are no longer "boxes" in which people work. they offer lots of light and secluded spaces to sit. And you will (soon) have a terrace in the neighborhood without getting wet ".

The site also responds to the trend towards more durability. The wood retains CO2, it is a lightweight material. Minimal energy was required for building materials and installation. And if the offices are disassembled one day, the materials can be recycled easily.

For Willem-Jan Neutelings, who is also the architect of the Herman Teirlinck building on the neighboring site occupied by the Flemish administration, Gare Maritime is also an exceptional project because it respects and restores the existing historical heritage while giving it back to taste. of the day.

As stated by the director of operations at Extensa, the developer of the project, the interior buildings are entirely built in CLT (laminated wood). "We used 10,000 m³ of wood for construction. The only concrete used is floor slabs. About 7.500 m² of historic cobblestones were removed, flattened to smooth and replaced. We also recover 350 m² of the historic blue stone base "says Peter De Durpel.

That's not all: the tallest roofs will have 10,000 solar panels, with a total area of ​​17,000 square meters for a production of 3,000 MWh, equivalent to the consumption of 850 households.

The ten wooden modules of 4,500 square meters will accommodate not only offices, but also shops (8,000 square meters on the ground floor). Along the covered median street, in an atmosphere of covered ramblas, will rise a 3.000 m² garden with sixty mature trees. Because it never rains, the greenery must be irrigated artificially. A gigantic underground water basin was built for this purpose (2 tanks of 1,300 m³). Events will be organized regularly in Central Avenue. The first will be a gastronomy festival, scheduled for the first weekend of September 2020. There will also be a street of permanent food, with stalls of local producers.

From now on, a wooden module will be delivered every month. Spaces by Regus will open one as a coworking space in the spring of 2020. Publicis, currently housed in the neighboring Customs House, will integrate its new offices in the wake. Two modules will be dedicated to public occupants: a training center, a creche or even a school. In the summer of 2021, the village in the city must be completely inhabited. About 2,000 people will work on the Gare Maritime site.

A car park of 900 cars will open at the beginning of 2020. The construction of 250 new homes will start almost immediately in buildings up to 12 storeys. At present, 115 units are already occupied. And demand remains strong: Extensa sells an average of 10 new homes a month for the moment.

In the short term, a new planning permit will be introduced for 350 dwellings remaining out of 700 programmed between Picard Street, the Maritime Station and the Tour & Taxis Park. On the entire site, other residential projects will follow the other side of the park in successive phases.