Contrary to jokes, the best architectural stories are the longest and most elaborate: stories that require time, an ability to listen and persistence to come to fruition; stories that withstand adversity, feed on the unexpected and are as a result perhaps better equipped than others to stand the test of time. Agwa’s patient transformation of the Takeda brownfield in Molenbeek into a secondary school is just such a project.

The operation was launched seven years ago by ‘Pouvoir organisateur pluriel’, a non-profit organization that promotes active learning methods in mainstream education. Agwa won an initial call for tenders in the winter of 2017 and carried out an initial phase of works that enabled the first pupils to be welcomed at the start of the 2017 school year, but which would subsequently be developed in the west wing of the former office building, on an occupied site. In the spring of 2018, the Brussels Government Architect launched a new consultation for an overall redevelopment and an extension of the school, with no guarantee that Agwa would be able to extend its contract. However, it was their project that the jury chose, recognizing the ability of the Brussels-based office to draw a clear and obvious vision from the many intertwined data and constraints: the intersection of two linear sequences of buildings at the site of a new distribution core.