Programmatic and planning study for the CITROËN building
The Citroën garage is a building constructed by the architects A. Dumont and M. Van Goethem in the early 1930s. It is an immense 16 500 m2 complex designed to take a car factory and showroom, and is a textbook example of the functionalist logic and industrial architecture of the interwar years. Glass and steel are virtually the only building materials, and the scale and particularly streamlined design lend the building a great expressiveness. Themes such as openness, light, transparency, flexibility and horizontality play a major part. The building occupies practically the entire block and is composed quite literally of a head and a body: the showroom, which looks towards the city, and the workshops, which represent the nerve centre, bustling with activities. Man and logistics are the arteries that breathe life into the building. Together they constitute the Citroën garage: the showroom and the workshops form a single whole. The building was purchased by the Société d’Aménagement Urbain de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, which hopes to convert it to receive a museum of modern and contemporary art. The study conducted by Wessel de Jonghe, Advisers and MSA aims:
to define the heritage qualities of the various components of the building
to establish the conditions for transforming this building into a museum of modern and contemporary art, together with an architecture centre and complementary programmes opening up towards local neighbourhoods;
to consider the planning conditions for opening up the building to its immediate surroundings.
The study has been completed, and now serves as the basis for the international architecture competition that will be launched shortly with a view to transforming the Citroën garage into a Brussels branch of the Pompidou Centre.
Associés: Wessel de Jonghe, Advisers.
MO: Société d'Aménagement Urbain