A disoriented architecture nestled in a Flemish suburb

TRANS architectuur’s design for De Schoor in Turnhout forms part of a broader plan for the transformation of an exclusively residential suburb into a multifunctional neighborhood. The service center flanks a new public road, where further programs and public spaces will be realized in the near future. The building is comprised of a sequence of three blocks, each one clearly recognizable because of its orientation and the specific gradient of its double-pitched roof. The volume towards the street, almost bi-dimensional, functions as the entrance hall and, more importantly, as the complex’s urban front; a row of meeting and training rooms find place within an elongated block with evenly laid-out openings; finally, an unusually pointed building, hosting a double-height polyvalent space, provides the institution with a certain degree of monumentality.

In TRANS architectuur’s words: “The design uses familiar figures from the suburban environment, but adjusts them, scales them up and transforms them into a new composition”. A non-ordinary architecture stems from these considerations, disoriented and slightly uncanny, precisely because of its slight shift from the ordinary. Its three “houses” are unusual objects, challenging the same model that they draw inspiration from. This critical process also continues in their interior, populated by fragments of strictly domestic pieces of furniture, removed from their home’s intimacy and re-contextualized in the common spaces of a collective building.