park reyers, brussels
The corporate headquarters of the Flemish television and the French-speaking television sit on a 20 Ha site in the commune of Schaerbeek, in Brussels, which is currently underutilized. The Masterplan that has been drafted must enable the urban development of the site and the renovation of the two buildings, which will become the heart of a pole of activity that will revolve around creative industries and the media. A park of 8.5 hectares articulates the whole operation.
It fits within the city of Brussels according to logics that relate, at the same time, to landscape and programme, acting as the cross roads between the historical Leopoldian traces (parks of Forest and Duden, Bois de la Cambre, Campus de la Plaine, park of the Cinquantenaire, park Josaphat) and the northwest arch of the innovation and communication technologies (headquarters of Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Movistar).
This park, of unitary gesture, is constituted by a rosary of landscape pieces of contrasted spatial characteristics that serve as base to various activities. It articulates its components (building, topography, vegetation, water) through a common logic.
The new urban park is a pole of attraction, a magnet that articulates the urban fabric and nourishes the life of the city. It is constituted as a path that leads from Reyers Boulevard to Mommaents Avenue and to which all the elements destined to guarantee the transversal routes are linked. The park infiltrates beyond its limits, through the existing roads and axes, creates links that allow taking advantage of the potential of the surrounding zones in mutation and introduces a new logic in its relation with the operations to develop: they will stop being between the city and the park and will be around it.
Throughout the park, plant continuities take advantage of the existing masses and seek distorting effects of scale and depth. They relate neighbouring parks according to a principle of complementarity of uses and protection of ecosystems. The park is the nucleus where the activities of the media are developed, the lung that connects all the buildings and the place for exchanges. Its actors meet there with the people of the city in a convivial way. The park becomes the inevitable mediator that links the media pole with the metropolis.