Name: Margaux Lomax
Track: Architecture
Studio: Interiors Buildings Cities
Year: MSc 3/4 / 2025
Type: Graduation Project
Tutor: Susanne Pietsch, Elina Karanastasi, Sereh Mandias
Description:
To design a house for the Flemish Architecture Institute (VAi) is to create an architecture which embodies the VAi’s nature and public action. The project aims to build upon the institution’s existing site: deSingel, a 1960s modernist art campus outside Antwerp centre, whose architectural potential was overcome by the city’s Ring-highway and lacks inter-tenant cohesion. A first intervention in the complex reorganizes the tenants into coherent clusters, removes redundant zones, and centralizes shared spaces. A second intervention, vertically extends the existing one of deSingel’s concrete skeletons to house the VAi archive depot; integrating the institution into deSingel with a distinct volume. Retrofitting deSingel Through economy of means, care, and repair, the house for the VAi is redefined to the repurposing, reorganization, and inhabitation of an existing neglected structure; reconsidering deSingel and the VAi according to their new needs. A testament of modesty in the name of all deSingel’s institutions.