The Brazilian climate allows the structure of a building to be incorporated very directly into the final appearance. There is no insulating cladding covering the building that necessitates a second layer – the building’s façade finish. This helps Mendes da Rocha to give the concrete a certain primal, natural character without additions or additional layers of meaning. It seems as though the concrete has always belonged to nature and springs from it. This idea is further reinforced by integrating the vegetation with the building. For Trans, accepting the weathering of the concrete is confirmation that the building wishes to be part of the changes taking place in nature.

In a number of Trans’s projects, such as Ryhove Urban Factory and the logistics building for the Meise Botanical Garden, the architects have brought the structure to the fore. In the new hall on the De Felix site in Gentbrugge, the influence of Mendes da Rocha is unmistakable. The old service centre that Paul Felix conceived for Gentbrugge in the 1970s (see A 295) is nothing but concrete, concrete, concrete… It seemed a hopeless task to turn it into a new community centre housing a library, a theatre, a police station and an administrative office. But Trans demonstrated that preservation – and even further expansion with an additional concrete structure featuring an exoskeleton – was both feasible and more sustainable than demolition and reconstruction.