WTC Tower Teachings

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The direct trigger for the move of the Faculty of Architecture was the need for extra work space. The numbers of architecture students following courses at the Brussels Campus have outgrown the Faculty building at the Paleizenstraat (Brussels), located in the former Meurop furniture shop. Also, the dilapidated condition of the accommodation has been key in understanding many frustrations among staff and students. After a years-long process of institutional introspection on the future of the building was in danger of leading nowhere, the move to the nearby North Quarter came as a line of flight. Suddenly, the vast open floor space of the WTC complex appeared as a unique opportunity to undermine all preexisting concepts of schooling. The temporary occupation of the WTC complex provided yet another opportunity: it allowed the Faculty of Architecture to plunge into the big, if not biggest, urban trauma of Brussels. In the 1970s the so-called North Quarter in Brussels was simply erased to make play for a central business district and highway traffic node. The idle WTC tower buildings symbolize in the strongest sense the hollowing out of urban life by corporate real estate interest in the Belgian and Europea­n capital. In this context, the temporary dépendance organized an architecture education that teaches the complexities and contradictions of urban production not in an abstract classroom but through inhabiting one of its symptoms. After the WTC complex got closed off in January 2018, the enthusiasm to venture into other nomadic schooling experiments was as high as the determination to rethink the ‘Meurop’ building at the Paleizen­straat. A group of students (some of them ex-students by then) was pulling together under the banner of ‘Pilot BXL’ and used the experiences at WTC24 to redesign the Meurop building in an open conversation with students and teaching staff, inviting honorable guest critics (Isabelle Doucet, Tom Weaver, Jan De Vylder) to think along. The initiative of Pilot BXL was brought to a greater magnitude by setting up a parallel workgroup called the ‘OC Brussel­s’ (‘Education Committee’) operating at the institutional level of the school. In the high spirit of WTC24, the OC Brussels assembled professors, students and administrative staff. The book you are holding in your hands stems from the very same desire to formulate the lessons learned of one and a half years of experiences at WTC24 and to use these lessons as a sounding board to think about the future of our Faculty of Architecture. The initiative to


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