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Development and Recovery of the Heysel Plateau area, Brussels.
Nowadays Heysel is being perceived as a peripherical neighbourhood, more for the discontinuity of the urban fabric caused by the vast parks and the EXPO that surround it than by its distance from the centre. We understand that the challenge deduced from the brief is a great opportunity to propose as vital the creation of an entire new city fragment. This means that the residential units, services and commercial facilities will have to be the real dynamic substrate of its urban structure. Therefore, the project takes advantage of the synergies generated by the metropolitan equipment in order to found its true personality on the urban potential of the fabric of everyday uses rather than the eloquence of its grand objects. The difficulty consists in measuring the necessary “amount of architecture” in order to achieve a balanced coexistence of residential units and services that could be considered as dense and the program of main architectural happenings: A Conference Centre (3.500 seats), a multi-purpose-hall (15.000 spectators), a sports complex of urban scale and a commercial centre (100.000 m2) amongst others.