Stadsloket ’t Noord

A small district hall for a neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium. It contains thoughts on the intimacy of cities and their material culture.

Apart from fulfilling its necessary administrative tasks - permits, documents etc. - it also has the capacity to host the cultural output of its neighbourhood, making it a part of the events and occurrences that give a city its character. A ‘Burgerzaal’ (Dutch for citizen’s room) is conceived below the expressive structure of the roof, looking just above the roofs of the surroundings. 15. Its cultural outreach allows the building to become an actor in the occurrences that are part of our mental mapping that make cities legible, enabling us to understand them through recognisable elements that assert familiarity. \nOverall, the project is conceived as a public building in timber. With the population increasingly living in urban areas, we need to think how to densify cities sustainably, and in Europe timber will need to play a large part in it. However, this material is usually ascribed to rural or domestic uses. This notion I reject. This project is thus an exploration on how to use timber, architecturally and constructively, to achieve a language worthy of a civic public building.