In the Liège basin, large-scale industries are gradually leaving the area to make way for high-tech companies. Is there still room for doubt when it comes to industrial landscapes and competitiveness? Daniel Delgoffe blends science with poetry at the biotechnology firm Diagenode.

At first glance, the research centre of Diagenode – a company specialising in molecular research – has all the typical features of a building on the outskirts of town. A sober structure with steel cladding, a conventional signboard, a visitor car park, a few clumps of scrawny bushes and a guarded entrance. The building stands alongside a secondary tarmac road in an unfamiliar landscape, amidst a mundane tangle of roads, housing estates, woods and high-tech companies, not far from the blast furnaces of the Liège basin.