Thirty years ago, OMA – Rem Koolhaas completed the Kunsthal, a landmark of public and cultural architecture in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, where a ‘highway’, a series of museums and a network of green spaces converge. “This universal architectural icon has been close to our hearts since the very beginning of our studies. Not out of nostalgia for a bygone era, but out of appreciation for an architecture that embraces ambiguity, multiple scales and a narrative; an architecture built upon the various spatial relationships it questions: ‘motorway’/park, culture/leisure, spatiality/programme, authenticity/strangeness… This project is not only a reference ‘par excellence’; it is an inventive, highly precise and yet somewhat cobbled-together masterpiece that serves as an example of a timeless approach and an uncomplicated attitude towards the social and architectural trends of a particular period.

Magasin 4, a concert hall project Central is currently working on, is also a public and cultural building, but this time in Brussels, at the junction of a wide road running alongside the canal and a cluster of still-active industrial buildings. This small temple of celebration and culture, embedded in an environment undergoing rapid change, was designed in direct dialogue with the neighbourhood and the city. “It is interesting for us, in all modesty, to draw a parallel with the Kunsthal. The context has, of course, changed significantly since then. More than ever, we find ourselves in an era in which various social imperatives compel us to collectively rethink our building methods, to question the interdependence of form and programme, and to redefine the scalability of a project in both the short and long term. Under these conditions, we have defined an architecture that is immediate in its form and multifaceted in the relationships it enables.