Maison des Matériaux II Belval

Behles & Jochimsen Architects

New science quarter

It’s rather unusual for uni­ver­si­ties to stock up ar­chi­tec­turally for the future. New-build ven­tures are gen­er­ally only en­ter­tained once the ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ties have been burst­ing at the seams for a while. That’s not the case with Maison des Matériaux II in the new Lux­em­bourg borough of Belval, though – this really is what one might call a “stock­pile build­ing”. It was con­ceived and built with an­tic­i­pated future re­quire­ments in mind and its spatial con­fig­u­ra­tion was planned in­tel­li­gently and flex­i­bly enough to ensure it can be used in what­ever way future needs dictate.

The venture is part of the Belval “science city” that has been taking shape at Esch-sur-Alzette in south Lux­em­bourg since 2003. A fully-fledged dis­trict for ed­u­ca­tion and re­search is being erected here on the site of a former steel­works that em­braces a mix of housing, offices and ser­vices and in which in­sti­tu­tions newly es­tab­lished by Lux­em­bourg Uni­ver­sity and the Lux­em­bourg In­sti­tute of Science and Tech­nol­ogy play a defin­ing role.

Forming an im­pos­ing back­drop is the mon­u­men­tal period in­dus­trial ar­chi­tec­ture of what was once the largest steel mill in the region, com­plete with its pre­served fur­naces. This erst­while path-break­ing in­dus­try has long since ceased op­er­at­ing here, however, and the site’s new ar­chi­tec­ture is point­ing the way forward instead. The two build­ings Maison des Matériaux I and II form a clearly co­he­sive whole. Their in­ter­mesh­ing L-shaped ground plans yield two dis­tinct court­yard sce­nar­ios. In ad­di­tion to having sep­a­rate main en­trances, they also share a common service core at their point of in­ter­sec­tion.

Architecture and Object

Behles & Jochim­sen Ar­chitek­ten
Photo: ©Annette Koroll

“Door handles being those con­stituents of a build­ing one takes hold of, they always serve as points of focus,” say Behles & Jochim­sen, who like to adopt a handle model jointly per­fected by them­selves and FSB for their pro­jects.

Materials science lab

This is a lab­o­ra­tory for ma­te­ri­als sci­ences whose ar­chi­tec­tural idiom is like­wise en­tirely grounded in the use and han­dling of ma­te­ri­als. The build­ing’s L-shaped cubage is mono­lithic, un­ruf­fled and straight­for­ward. Solely re­spon­si­ble for im­part­ing such a high-pro­file iden­tity to the edifice is its moulded brick­work façade. Bricks pro­ject­ing at regular in­ter­vals impact in a way that is en­liven­ingly dis­so­nant. Dis­creet hor­i­zon­tal banding groups floors to­gether in twos and helps struc­ture the build­ing vi­su­ally.

Shape has been lent to a linear ar­chi­tec­ture both inside and out. Liberal use has been made of timber amongst other ma­te­ri­als indoors, thus in­ject­ing added warmth into the clean-lined ar­chi­tec­ture. Here, too, the ar­chi­tects pro­ceeded with sculp­tural intent when fitting the ma­te­r­ial. Rather than simply being pan­elled, walls and a stair­case in the foyer have been lined with slats the spaces between which give rise to a fine striped effect. This sense of geom­e­try is echoed in re­duc­tion­ist ban­is­ters in­cor­po­rat­ing slender steel posts.

The device chosen to operate the project’s doors is FSB’s 1097 model. A system of clas­si­fy­ing ex­ist­ing door-lever designs was elab­o­rated when draft­ing the handle in the course of which two con­trast­ing formal styles were made out: “curved” handle shapes and those that had been “or­gan­i­cally trans­formed”. The FSB 1097 handle model was arrived at by merging the two formal cat­e­gories iden­ti­fied and draws on those most rudi­men­tary of basic shapes, the circle and the straight line.

Co­op­er­at­ing as a con­sor­tium: Behles & Jochim­sen (concept, blue­print and de­tailed plan­ning) and WW+ ar­chitek­tur + man­age­ment sàrl (specs and site man­agers).

Object Details

Photos: Marcus Bredt

Location

Maison des Matériaux II Belval Luxemburg

Belval Esch an der Alzette,
Lux­em­burg

Anfahrt planen