Good architecture begins with good commissioning. If we look at the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Gerrit Rietveld, for example, their clients – Baron Charles de Beistegui, Pierre Couturier, Grete Tugendhat, Phyllis Lambert and Truus Schröder-Schräder – are emphatically present in the background. Today is no different. The story behind the Mobilis project, a design by Xaveer De Geyter Architects for D’Ieteren Immo that is currently under construction, illustrates what happens when a visionary architect, ambitious public authorities and an enlightened commissioner aim for architectural quality in the twenty-first century.

About forty years ago, Roland D’Ieteren, a direct descendant of Jean-Joseph D’Ieteren, founder of the eponymous company, wrote a letter to the then mayor of the Brussels municipality of Anderlecht, Christian D’Hoogh. D’Ieteren had his eye on the land at the corner of Boulevard Industriel, Boulevard Paepsem and the Canal and, with the necessary entrepreneurial spirit, managed to convince the mayor to sell the land for the construction of an automobile garage. When, decades later, that garage needed renovation, a plan was conceived within D’Ieteren to build a new showroom on the property. The envisioned ‘shoebox on a parking lot’ fitted perfectly among the industrial sheds in the unregulated amalgam of this industrial part of the Brussels Canal Zone. However, the project was lacking in vision. ‘We left the meeting with the authorities with the realization that we could shelve our project, but then also saw that there was a unique opportunity before us’, recalls Greet Mertens, head of architecture at D’Ieteren Immo. The group had a plot of land on which it could adjust the initial 3,000 m2 of garage and showroom to almost 35,000 m2 of productive functions fitting within the Canal Plan, Alexandre Chemetoff’s plan for the development of the Brussels Canal Zone.