1508 CHAPEX
Palais des Expositions de la Ville de Charleroi
- Location :
- Charleroi
- Client :
- Charleroi c/o IGRETEC
- Team :
- AjdvivgwA - AM architecten jan de vylder inge vinck - AgwA
- Subcontractors :
- Doorzon, Denis Dujardin, Greisch, DELTA GC, PROGRS, TTAS, architecten de vylder vinck taillieu (until 2019)
- Planning :
- 2015-2024
- Category :
- Ongoing
“The story of the convention centre in the Belgian city of Charleroi is a mirror to the city’s economic trajectory. The idea for the Palais des Expositions was hatched in 1948, riding the swell of a remarkable postwar recovery and building on its industrial prominence in the previous century. The French‑speaking Wallonian city is in the so‑called Pays Noir – ‘black country’, named after the coal it sits on. Evidence of this industrial activity remains in the slag heaps looming across the landscape and the metropolises of decaying factories and mining infrastructure.
The site chosen for the Palais des Expositions was on the sunken western flank of the city, on land occupied by a disused glassworks. A colossal 60,000m2 edifice was designed by Joseph André, the architect behind several fine buildings in the city between the 1920s and ‘60s. It was organised into two large volumes containing vast exhibition halls – including one with an uninterrupted span of 60m – with a central stately foyer hall between them, topped with glass‑block domes and dominated by broad staircases.
The first exhibitions opened in 1954 – including the Salon International des Arts Ménagers (International Household Arts Exhibition), which ran annually until 2017 – and were followed by six decades of trade fairs, camping and caravanning displays, car exhibitions, dog shows and much more. The lowest level housed a sports complex, including a 16‑lane bowling alley and tennis courts, as well as a fire brigade barracks. A swathe of land to the north soon became a vast car park, and most visitors entered the building from what had been its rear.
However, Charleroi’s heyday was already behind it, and the 1960s onwards were characterised by rapid decline as coal was replaced by oil and the attendant industries waned. By the time a competition for the convention centre’s transformation was held in 2015, the ground floor included a track for remote‑controlled cars and a skate park.
(…)
The architects challenged what the project could be: rather than replacing the central foyer hall with a new construction, as suggested in the brief, they stripped the exterior walls of the existing structure away to create covered urban terraces. By becoming an outdoor space, the ‘low energy’ building prescribed by the brief became ‘zero energy’. The result is surreal. Generous boulevards and squares unfold across three floors, complete with streetlights and garden benches. The building’s skeleton – bearing the colour‑code of its previous uses (green for tennis courts, for example) – frames views of smokestacks and rewilded slag heaps to the west and the streetscape of the city centre to the east. The middle of the first‑floor slab has been removed to create an atrium down to the lowest floor, where the soil of the unmade sloped ground tumbles unheeded around the building’s columns. The chimneys of the disused heating plant – previously concealed within an internal courtyard – soar upwards.
The original brief specified three new underground floors for car parking and the renovation of four expo halls. This was contradicted in the design process when several companies explained to the architects that the building needed to be only a third of the existing surface area. The ambition was further undermined by a minuscule budget (currently standing around €43 million) from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) – ‘a third of the budget that was needed’ to fulfil the brief (…).
When it transpired that the whole ground‑floor slab would have to be insulated to comply with regulations if the car parking were built underground, blowing the tiny budget, it was entirely – if counterintuitively – logical to propose that the whole southern building, with floors strong enough to carry vehicles for the purposes of car shows, could become a multi‑storey car park. The ambition to build more floor area evaporated. The extent of the thermal envelope, already challenged by the transformation of the foyer hall into external terraces, was reduced even further, contracting to 25,000m2; only the lower two floors of the northern volume – including the fully modernised black‑box exhibition hall on the lowest floor – are comfort‑controlled.”
Extract from : Eleanor Beaumont, “Breaking convention: Chapex in Charleroi, Belgium, by AgwA and Architecten Jan de Vylder Inge Vinck”, in Architectural Review, 19/02/2024
The site chosen for the Palais des Expositions was on the sunken western flank of the city, on land occupied by a disused glassworks. A colossal 60,000m2 edifice was designed by Joseph André, the architect behind several fine buildings in the city between the 1920s and ‘60s. It was organised into two large volumes containing vast exhibition halls – including one with an uninterrupted span of 60m – with a central stately foyer hall between them, topped with glass‑block domes and dominated by broad staircases.
The first exhibitions opened in 1954 – including the Salon International des Arts Ménagers (International Household Arts Exhibition), which ran annually until 2017 – and were followed by six decades of trade fairs, camping and caravanning displays, car exhibitions, dog shows and much more. The lowest level housed a sports complex, including a 16‑lane bowling alley and tennis courts, as well as a fire brigade barracks. A swathe of land to the north soon became a vast car park, and most visitors entered the building from what had been its rear.
However, Charleroi’s heyday was already behind it, and the 1960s onwards were characterised by rapid decline as coal was replaced by oil and the attendant industries waned. By the time a competition for the convention centre’s transformation was held in 2015, the ground floor included a track for remote‑controlled cars and a skate park.
(…)
The architects challenged what the project could be: rather than replacing the central foyer hall with a new construction, as suggested in the brief, they stripped the exterior walls of the existing structure away to create covered urban terraces. By becoming an outdoor space, the ‘low energy’ building prescribed by the brief became ‘zero energy’. The result is surreal. Generous boulevards and squares unfold across three floors, complete with streetlights and garden benches. The building’s skeleton – bearing the colour‑code of its previous uses (green for tennis courts, for example) – frames views of smokestacks and rewilded slag heaps to the west and the streetscape of the city centre to the east. The middle of the first‑floor slab has been removed to create an atrium down to the lowest floor, where the soil of the unmade sloped ground tumbles unheeded around the building’s columns. The chimneys of the disused heating plant – previously concealed within an internal courtyard – soar upwards.
The original brief specified three new underground floors for car parking and the renovation of four expo halls. This was contradicted in the design process when several companies explained to the architects that the building needed to be only a third of the existing surface area. The ambition was further undermined by a minuscule budget (currently standing around €43 million) from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) – ‘a third of the budget that was needed’ to fulfil the brief (…).
When it transpired that the whole ground‑floor slab would have to be insulated to comply with regulations if the car parking were built underground, blowing the tiny budget, it was entirely – if counterintuitively – logical to propose that the whole southern building, with floors strong enough to carry vehicles for the purposes of car shows, could become a multi‑storey car park. The ambition to build more floor area evaporated. The extent of the thermal envelope, already challenged by the transformation of the foyer hall into external terraces, was reduced even further, contracting to 25,000m2; only the lower two floors of the northern volume – including the fully modernised black‑box exhibition hall on the lowest floor – are comfort‑controlled.”
Extract from : Eleanor Beaumont, “Breaking convention: Chapex in Charleroi, Belgium, by AgwA and Architecten Jan de Vylder Inge Vinck”, in Architectural Review, 19/02/2024
