Museums often try to reflect the world around them, but rarely are they made so literally of their surroundings as the new design museum in Ghent. Rising above the Belgian city’s medieval tiled rooftops like an angular white watchtower, the new building has vacuumed up the city’s condemned concrete frames, windows, car windscreens, sinks and old toilets, and transformed them, phoenix-like, into a gleaming monument to recycling. The new design museum doesn’t quite go that far in its nose-to-tail approach, but almost.
The toilet cubicles are a smorgasbord of “biomaterials”, each featuring different tiles made of seaweed, flax, wood terrazzo and volcanic ash (you can scan a QR code for more info while you’re sitting on the loo). Some walls are plastered with local clay, while a chunky column in the entrance hall revels in its earthy layers of rubble dug straight from the building site. But the real innovation is the brick, which was specially developed, tested and certified for the project (funded by a grant from Circular Flanders and Sogent, the city’s development agency).
Each brick is made of 63% construction waste, sourced from within 8km of the museum, pulverised and compressed with hydrated lime, saving two-thirds of the embodied carbon of a regular fired clay brick. And the lime will continue to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as it cures over the coming months and years. For €10, you can take one home from the museum shop.
Public participation extended to defining the very essence of the museum, too. In keeping with Belgium’s democratic traditions, a “citizens’ panel” of 40 people, drawn from a wide variety of Ghent residents, was established to inform what the museum should be. Their 100+ recommendations ranged from incorporating unticketed areas, to being able to see work-in-progress, and having plenty of seating, as well as ensuring that the “chic” building didn’t put people off.
The result is as locally sourced and collaboratively created as big civic buildings come. The new building stands with the presence of a grand Ghent house, rising in five large storeys, and turning as it climbs to face the city centre, with big picture windows looking out in different directions on each floor. It certainly has a bold presence.
Not everyone has welcomed its industrial bulk. Concerns have been raised about how the boxy white mass lumbers into view from the city’s quaint historical centre, and there is something slightly clumsy about the form on the skyline, topped with multiple roofs angled in different directions. Silicone joints between stretches of brick don’t help either, reading as unsightly seams from a distance.
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