In 2019, a competition was launched with a simple question to refresh the Vooruit grand café in Ghent: an architectural firm had to make a spatial gesture to breathe new life into the interior. One of the firms selected to compete was B-ild. After a thorough investigation of what the grand café had become, B-ild had no choice but to present a bold, risky but, in hindsight, logical idea that took a step back from a one-off miracle and worked closely with Inside Outside.

Vooruit Café is a traditional venue in the centre of Ghent, housed in an impressive building with character and history, and therefore attracts many visitors, especially students. Until a few years ago, visitors entered a cluttered but familiar interior that had undergone many necessary, uncontrolled changes over the years. The space always welcomed you, but it was no longer a place for meeting and conversation. Instead, it became a place to pass the time, usually behind a laptop, or to attend a few events, but to leave without any real memory of the space other than its faded glory. After researching the space and its context, B-ild concluded that a single spatial gesture would become yet another intervention in the already fragmented interior. They therefore proposed putting together a team of interior, lighting and acoustic specialists who would work quietly on the improvement and avoid a temporary intervention that would not address the core problems of the space. B-ild brought Kahle Acoustics on board for the acoustics, Chris Pype for the lighting design and Inside Outside for the interior. Instead of designing some kind of intervention, they proposed to analyse the space thoroughly and take sustainable measures. The result is a testament to professional subtlety and modesty in dealing with architectural heritage.