Through a precise visual intervention, Stéphane Beel Architects are radically transforming the appearance of the Cité Coloniale, the site of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. At a reasonable distance from the existing museum building, a new entrance pavilion stands proudly on the edge of the garden.

The French garden was laid out in 1897 alongside the Palace of the Colonies, for Leopold II’s colonial exhibition, which served as the setting for the World’s Fair. Almost one hundred metres from the museum building – which was designed thirteen years later by Charles Girault for the 1910 World’s Fair – a new museum entrance is situated as a beam-shaped volume at right angles to Leuvensesteenweg, running parallel to the museum. Access to the entire site, and therefore also to the museum, has been relocated to its original position a little further on. Visitors are thus guided past the once fully glazed Colonial Palace, through the wooded part of the site, towards the new entrance pavilion. The experience of this historically significant location is thus restored to its original setting: the World’s Fairs at the beginning of the twentieth century.