The Heterotopia Pool | E13 Runner-Up
Europan 13 - Belgium, Charleroi, Runner-Up Project ( 2nd Prize )
Like the city of Charleroi, the reality of Gilly is a mixture out of the historical scenes. The Heterotopia Pool in the Place Destrée can be a clear Form that holds all culture, all real. It links the fragments sites, changes the functions within a single form, bridges the twisted and broken time and space under varying historical circumstances.
History
During the last thousand years, Gilly gradually developed itself as a kind of self-evident processes. But after all processes’ fading out, nowadays, a rich but unclear situation is left by the overlap and mixture of different periods.
With the dying of the mining industry, there is no self-evident activity happening like the historical periods before. The city space became the mixture, the mist, the mystery. Typically the Place Destrée can be characterised as a fragmentally leftover space constituted by the public buildings, road, parking lot, green areas.
The proposal for the Place Destrée should be a simple but precise reaction to all those conditions.
Strategies
－ Form a simple “Pool” to have a clear spacial identity
The pool with a 235m x 32.5m platform, an underground car park, a linear service rooms, three renovated big halls and an observation tower can hold all culture, sport, social activities which can be easily changed by the scales, the seasons.
－Link the “Pool” with the nature and artificial landscape
The pool is located at the same level as the east landscape which brings a lot of benefits of linking the existing surrounding public facilities: town hall annexe, metro station, municipal hall, cultural centre…
－Generate a net of public circulation surrounding the “Pool”
The net was formed by the same tiles and trees to connect the whole public area. The pool become the new heart of the public activities in Gilly.
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Team: ACT (Atelier Chen Tan) / Yajun CHEN & Gaofei TAN