It’s not every day that a contractor, just before the winter break, has a chip van brought onto the site to have a quick natter with the staff, the workers, the architect and the client. It is just as unusual for the architect to know every contractor and every labourer by name. Yet this is precisely the scene at the construction site for the new wing of the Z33 art centre in Hasselt. Despite the difficulties encountered during the tendering process and the high level of detail required, architect Francesca Torzo gets on famously with her foremen from the Houben-Belemco consortium.

Before the Italian architect Francesca Torzo won the international competition to transform the Z33 centre in 2012, the process had been a real ordeal. Indeed, the first tender went particularly badly. The lowest bid was no less than €1 million above the €6 million estimate. The other contractors, for their part, had submitted significantly higher prices. A real nightmare scenario. But that was without knowing Francesca Torzo and her relentless focus on the figures. After examining the various bids, she concluded that the cheapest one contained calculation errors such that it was invalid. But she also discovered significant anomalies in the other bidders’ submissions. She quickly suspected that the tender had not been fully understood.