Villa Voka
Invited competition, 1st prize
The office building housing the Chamber of Commerce in West Flanders stands like
a villa in the landscape of the urbanised edge of Kortrijk. The building is conceived as
having two faces, like the Roman god Janus, showing distinctly different aspects to
the street and the garden. The representative façade on the street side, completely of
glass, displays the organisation’s operations like a billboard in a giant concrete cabinet.
The only elements within the open plan are the two prominent staircases. The entrance
is on the more intimate side of the building facing the garden. Its V-shape frames a part
of the landscape and embraces the entrance plaza with a lower-lying patio, around
which all the public parts of the building are accommodated. Here Villa Voka forms the
edge of the “meadow”, an open place in the wooded landscape. Both the façade and
the plaza are finished with steel grid work that shields them from the sun out of the
south, and also serves as a uniform and abstract material for the frame around several
trees.
