guldensporencollege site kaai, kortrijk, belgium
The remodelling of the campus of what once was the St-Amandscollege responds to the need to update its educational infrastructure at a time when it wants to integrate with another campus located east of the city centre and increase its capacity from 800 to 1,400 students, which involves both renovating existing buildings and building new ones.
But this remodelling is also an opportunity to improve its articulation with the city around it. The campus is located in the ring of open spaces that surround the central part of Kortrijk and on the edge of an area in full transformation, such as Overleie, with which it is poorly integrated. Addressing this context is essential.
The need to establish a north-south corridor for bicycles and pedestrians through the campus, as well as to facilitate east-west accessibility of the latter, must make the private nature of the facility compatible with a certain level of openness to the public.
This implies planning the new buildings and their accesses strategically, but, above all, defining the general accessibility to the site in a way that allows segregating or integrating itineraries to reconcile two very different groups of users: the educational community and the city's neighbours.
The 144 parking spaces for vehicles are distributed in five cores along the perimeter, in such a way that they facilitate access from various parts of Kortrijk, distribute the impact of wheeled mobility on the environment and do not give rise to uninteresting large areas. The same applies to the 1,100 spaces for bicycles, divided into three large groups.
The development of the proposal involves an agreement between the local administration and the private managers of the centre, specifying the projects to be carried out by each of them as well as the respective investments. It also implies the participation of other agents, such as Eandis for services or Parko for car parks, and is accompanied by an execution schedule that identifies the deadlines to carry out all the foreseen works in a maximum of six years.