Following Alberti’s formula, “The house is a small city and the city a large house”, the project proposes making the Belgian Pavilion a reduced model of an excellent urban planning solution: the “Lobe City”. 

The model proposes green insertions to separate the neighborhoods and oxygenate the city at its center, while maintaining a concentric network of rings unifying the different neighborhoods. This notion of sustainability at the regional scale, of urban development has structured the concept of the pavilion and its surroundings.

The concept regarding rural land management comes from the intention of reconciling, on one side, the idea of a generous and reassuring farmland, faithful to the cultural and ideological representation of traditional Belgian and European landscapes, with on the other, the idea of technological and ethical  progress which brings forth the debate over food production of tomorrow. Within this framework, rural land management will along a gentle slope, associate farming, bucolic and floral environments with a collection of experimental facilities and cutting edge technologies.

Within this context, the urban plan of the “Lobe City” becomes architecture: the residential neighborhoods are the constructed volumes – the wood pavilions and the Farm – throughout which light circulates and upon the view over the surrounding greenery. The historic center of the city becomes the atrium, the heart of the project, formalized by a large geodesic structure in glass.