Heritage buildings restored as part of four-year construction programme
Carmody Groarke’s renovation and expansion of a design museum in the Belgian city of Ghent has opened following four years of construction work.
Design Museum Gent reopened its doors on Saturday with the scheme unveiling a contemporary new wing rising above the skyline of the Unesco World Heritage site city.
The project, which has been designed in collaboration with Belgian practice ATAMA, has also seen the restoration of the museum’s historic existing buildings dating back to the 16th century.
The museum said the freely accessible new wing allows the site to connect with the 21st century and serves as a space for “celebration, creation and discovery”.
The building includes a Stadskamer, or ‘city room’, where local communities can showcase their creations and socialise.
The design of the building has drawn on Ghent’s traditional building techniques with the use of timber and lime-cured white brick, which has been sourced from local municipal waste.
The brick is produced by hardening in a lime-curing process rather than being fired in kilns, which the museum said had significantly reduced the scheme’s carbon impact.
Design Museum Gent was founded in 1903 with the aim of educating craftspeople and designers about high-quality examples of furniture, textiles, ceramics and decorative arts.
Originally housed at Ghent’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, it moved in 1923 to Hotel De Coninck, an18th-century merchant’s townhouse built in 1755 which remains the historic core of the museum.
Postscript
All images credited to Johan Dehlin and Design Museum Gent
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