Headquarters of the Province of Antwerp / XDGA - Xaveer De Geyter Architects

The new building replaces a complex of modernist building volumes that used to occupy the entire site and could not be adapted to today’s sustainability standards. As the Antwerp city centre has few public green surfaces, the transformation of the site from a merely private, mineral, and infrastructural area into a public garden is a crucial requirement of the competition brief. Surrounded by fragments of public green, the parcel is key to the formation of a larger, coherent park. Another – contradictory - demand was to maintain a more recent representational pavilion, which was positioned as an obstacle in between the fragments.