tmSN House / BLAF Architecten

A typical challenge for Belgian cities today is to make their 19th and early 20th-century urban fabric more liveable and sustainable, without driving away all economic or manufacturing activities. Most of these areas are characterized by a mix of industry and housing, high land occupation, hardening of open space, and soil pollution. Today most of the industry has moved away from these areas and the infrastructure over time has been parcelled out to small-scale private owners. “Pitting” is one of the strategies that many cities include in their urban policies for these areas, trying to avoid tabula rasa. The tmSN house does so in a radical way.