51N4E proposes putting urban and social issues back in the heart of architectural intervention. Instead of trying to embellish our nowadays reality, their goal is to find ways to affect its performance, triggering new social relations. They create strategies and scenarios to extend relations between the private and the public, encouraging encounters and events, modifying behavioural patterns. In most of their projects, they combine confronted concepts such as individual-collective, public-private, interior-exterior...

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In order to free as much park space as possible, this unusual construction combines two different programs: a nursery school and a greenery service station in the middle of Merksem Park in Antwerp.

The building embraces both programs in a circular and compact building organized around a central courtyard, minimizing circulations and maximizing relations between the interior and its surroundings.

The kindergarten slab is elevated from the machinery area, stabilising an eye-to-eye connection between the two users, who are only separated by a glass wall. From the outside, the slab elevation unlinks the building from the ground, allowing vegetation to grow and flow freely.

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+ Bibliography links

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SWINNEN, Peter. Double or nothing: 51N4E. June 10, 2011

 

https://www.51n4e.com/project/speelpleinstraat-0#

 

http://thewordmagazine.com/neighbourhood-life/51n4e-the-architecture-practice-using-brussels-as-a-testing-ground-for-future-change/