Just as a tiny particle inside an oyster is slowly coated with layers of mother-of-pearl to eventually produce a pearl, it has taken many years for the project to be clad in its final layer of translucent, opalescent polycarbonate panels. Winners in 2008, Aloys Beguin and Brigitte Massart have won the competition to extend the former MAD (Museum of Diverse Arts), now known as Trinkhall, in the heart of Avroy Park in Liège, with a design that encases the former modernist pavilion built in 1963 by architect Maurice Chalant, a playful evocation of the sixties. The first stage of a long transformation.

The enigmatic latest addition to a menagerie of animal-shaped buildings that arrived in Liège in the late 2000s, the project is on the verge of coming to fruition. Following heated debates during the competition regarding the modernist heritage and the intervention on the existing pavilion, amidst funding issues and a complex construction site, the journey has been a long one. Despite the significant increase in volume, the project retains a pavilion-style footprint by incorporating the old pavilion. A folly in the park. In the distance, the image of the Crystal Palace, much like the former 19th-century Trinkhall, a bandstand that once enlivened the park and preceded the 1960s pavilion.