Community house Beveren

Community house Beveren

2021

Location

Roeselare, Belgium

Client

City Roeselare

Typology

Public, Leisure, Culture

Size

749 m2

Status

Competition

Partnerships

Cobe Ingenieurs, TECH3, EVA International

The City of Roeselare wants to create a new place for the Bevernaars where young and old can meet, relax, experience and play. A community center that strengthens the local social network and can accommodate various activities, users, associations and organizations.

We saw it as an assignment to translate this ambition literally through architecture by embedding the building in the neighborhood as extensively as possible.

The character of the Community House is derived from the surrounding residential typologies. We redefine the scale of the building by organizing the program into a collection of archetypal houses, diverse in their materiality and size but organized in one autonomous building.

This provides each program component of a specific identity and makes it recognizable. Each public space orients towards the landscape and is clustered around one heart, the central meeting/reception/circulation hall. The large multipurpose hall resides between the entrance hall and large storage spaces, buffering acoustics and logistics from the neighborhood. Due to its transparency, the library reveals its activities in the evenings towards the street. By positioning the building in the corner of the plot, both multipurpose halls and the youth activity space can be opened up to a newly created local park.