Morning Coffee: Design September with OFFICEU

In honor of Design September and the Festival of Architecture throughout Brussels, we wanted to learn more about the design and architecture of our home city. Since our architecture clients love architecture almost as much as we love coffee, we decided to ask them a few questions about their businesses and the architecture in Brussels. First up, Schaerbeek’s own – OFFICEU.

OFFICEU architects for urbanity is a committed Brussels-based design office for urban architecture. Their architecture is the physical expression of an intelligent urbanity. This urbanity includes a strong awareness of the all-embracing context: people, environment, society, economy, space, technology, materials and time. An intelligent urbanity stands for a thoughtful, responsible, open-minded and future oriented handling of this context, averse to dogma and fashion. They work in an office space in the wonderful business centre La Lustrerie in Schaerbeek, which used to be an old lamp factory.

Most Interesting Building: The Metro Network

“This is the biggest and most public building in Brussels, connecting and interacting with different neighborhoods and people from all over the city. From above-ground, it’s almost invisible and yet 400,000 people use it every day. Its huge potential is greatly underused today.”

PHOTO CREDIT: STIB Brussels

PHOTO CREDIT: STIB Brussels

Most Beautiful Building: The Citroën showroom

“This beautiful modernist building next to the Canal will become the new Cultural Centre of Brussels. The ambitions are high, and so we expected a lot from the international architectural competition that was launched for this project. Unfortunately, from the seven selected offices, six teams are a combination of Belgian offices with a (smaller) international office. It would have been more interesting if there was a better mix, with some big international offices too, that can completely think out of our Brussels box.”

citroen_yser

PHOTO CREDIT: visit.Brussels

Ugliest Building: The tower from the UP-site

“One can argue about beauty and ugliness, but the UP-tower is the highest building in Brussels, visible from almost everywhere. For a building like this, an architectural competition should always be organized. The building now is very banal and uninteresting and gives nothing back to its neighborhood.”

PHOTO CREDIT: BRUZZ

PHOTO CREDIT: BRUZZ

Any questions? We are here for you.
Ready to taste your new coffee?
Book a tasting
Your browser is out-of-date!

Update your browser to view this website correctly. Update my browser now

×