The City Palace Apartments & Office Complex / Atelier Kempe Thill

Antwerp New South has a high residential density and the ambition to become a new urban area. With which character ultimately? Will it be experienced as truly urban or rather as a highly dense suburban area?  With the City Palace, Atelier Kempe Thill has not only the opportunity to contribute to this orientation but also to design one of the most important buildings on the central square of the whole area: the Panamarenko square.  Atelier Kempe Thill sees the development of the new area primarily as a challenge to contemporary urban architecture, in the sense of a multifunctional, urban, all-around architecture that contributes as much as possible to the public space. The project is therefore designed with an active ground floor and a surrounding two-storey arcade of slender columns. These unite the ground floor and the first floor, which, combined with generous windows, form a kind of urban base. Together with the terraces of the upper floors, this theme is consistently developed around the entire building, which thus functions without any rear side.