City Hall Bruxelles

The Chair of Interiors Buildings Cities located this year’s graduation project in the capital city of Belgium and the European Union, Brussels. Under the theme of ‘Palace’, the project is a City Hall on the previous site of the Les Halles Centrales in the 1870s, and is also known as the site for the earlier demolished Parking 58. The site will be soon occupied by ‘BruCity’, a new city administrative centre that will house 1500 employees of la Ville de Bruxelles, and this presented us the opportunity to critique whether the new fully glazed monument could really represent its governance transparency and offer the space where the citizens could have their political agency presented. Corridor was the major design motif and project’s thematic narrative. The outside room, corridor, as an informal space has its capability and power of accommodating the occurrence of the real negotiations happening before people entering the formal proceedings. The definition of corridor was broken down into a series of connective spaces. By the introduction of the corridor-ness in the project, it also aims to change and promote the working practice for a city hall which is the forefront of addressing the urgency of change in today’s society.