Completed in autumn 2017, Daniel Delgoffe’s new Higher School of Circus Arts is a renovation and extension of the Ceria boiler house. A project that blends the old and the new, for better or for worse.

With its feet in the water but its head in fine particulate matter, the Ceria site in Anderlecht is a rather odd sort of club sandwich. Squeezed between the Brussels–Charleroi Canal and the E19 motorway on one side, and the SNCB overhead lines on the other, the ‘mayonnaise’ of this urban triangle is no longer at its freshest. XDGA’s ‘Kitchen Tower’ may overlook the motorway, but the campus built by Antoine Ceupens in the late 1950s lies dormant in its own juice, its bricks as yellowed as the lawn.