Cinema Hangar van Gent

Ghent is a city with many areas in transition, including Oude Dokken, one of the major challenges for the city's development. The project puts culture at the center of urban concerns by using its federating role to create social links in this neighbourhood in the making, while taking into account the rising current concerns about the limits of resources.

The project focuses on 4 points: the reuse of an existing structure, the activation of the public space by opening it to the neighbourhood, the materiality and the deployment of the program and its uses. \nThe concrete structure "Hangar Van Gent" is the starting point of the project, a former shipyard witnessing the former port activity. The site was transformed into a socio-cultural space for 8 years, in a temporary occupation project offering a wide range of activities: concerts, open-air screenings, markets, [...] The aim of the project is to reintegrate these uses by placing them in a permanent context.\nThe studio methodology has a great impact on our work: the proposal is not only architectural, the student must find his own program and site. The cinema program is justified by the importance of Ghent's cinematographic infrastructures, which host annually the largest film festival in Belgium. A local cinema would therefore be able to have an impact on an international scale and on the urban scale of the neighbourhood.\nThe project focuses primarily on dimensioning the components of a cinema to optimise the organisation of its rooms. By creating a staircase that integrates into the continuity of the public space, the spatial constraints of the cinema are used to allow spaces that do not need natural light to slide underneath, while providing the city with an urban public structure that marks the landscape. The staircase thus becomes the heart of the project, using the advantages of spatiality, inclination and seating to provide a third 'open air' room in the program.\nBy rehabilitating the existing structure, the building is integrated into a logic of reuse and circular economy: the raw earth brick material makes it possible to recover the earth from local building sites to manufacture raw earth bricks on the site itself. Building with raw earth today in Belgium means updating a vernacular technique that was already adapted to our local conditions, while offering the advantage of having a low environmental impact, being biodegradable, recyclable, and abundantly available.