A large, vacant office building in the centre of Brussels will soon be put to another use. Pending the start of the work, it is temporarily being occupied by a number of cultural organizations. LDSRa and Laura Muyldermans not only designed the workplaces, but also developed a new office typology.

Right opposite the Brussels Stock Exchange in the heart of the city stands an office building that takes up the whole width of a city block. The initial tenant has moved out, and a repurposing project for this office model is under way. Pending the start of the work, the owner has made the building available for temporary use so as to protect it from vandalism and degradation.
The first floor has been rented by different architecture organizations and offices. They saw potential in this centrally located 2,000 m² space with windows on three sides, despite the old-fashioned and heavily fragmented division of the space by means of system walls, ceilings and lighting. They commissioned Lauren Dierickx en Sander Rutgers architecten (LDSRa), in collaboration with Laura Muyldermans, to redesign the floor in such a way that room would be freed up not only for the offices of four organizations, but also for various (shared) meeting areas and especially a central collective space. This space forms the heart of the project and, according to the commissioners, ‘makes it possible to organize workshops, lectures and debates around the socio-spatial transitions our society is going through’.