Garden Palace

Abstract

Photo essay commissioned by Brussels based architectural agency Elmēs on a reconversion of Royal Museum for Art & History, Brussels

Garden Palace
Originally set up as a com­pe­ti­tion for a small sceno­graph­ic up­date for part of the Royal Museums of Art and History. Their win­ning pro­pos­al took the to­tal­i­ty of the mu­se­um into ac­count. By con­duct­ing an in-depth his­tor­i­cal analy­sis of the build­ing, we were able to pro­pose an in­ter­ven­tion that was­n’t an­oth­er ad­di­tion to an al­ready dis­ori­ent­ing lay-out, but one which took the whole of the museum’s ar­chi­tec­ture and cu­ra­to­r­i­al am­bi­tions at hard. The his­tor­i­cal in­ter­twin­ing of build­ing and gar­den was re­paired. The ex­hi­bi­tion rooms sur­round­ing the Japanese gar­den were re­stored to their orig­i­nal vol­umes and brought back into re­la­tion­ship with the green­ery. This sim­ple in­ter­ven­tion al­lowed the rooms to ben­e­fit once again from nat­ur­al day­light, while the re­la­tion­ship with the gar­den cre­at­ed a clear ori­en­ta­tion point for the vis­i­tor. The new raised floor in the Mercator wing es­tab­lished an im­me­di­ate ac­cess to the gar­den, open­ing up this piece of land­scape her­itage to the ben­e­fit of the mu­se­um and the visitor. (Text by Elmēs)