Mundaneum
Renovation of the main building reception areas, restructuring and compliance of the rear building and construction of an annex on Mundaneum site.
The Mundaneum is an encyclopedic project developed by two lawyers in Brussels from 1890. This is a decimal classification system, long before the invention of computers, file publications of all knowledge fields to create a universal bibliographic directory. These sheets and collections of photographs that were constituted around, was first hosted in 1920 in the palace of the Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Le Corbusier himself was very interested in this adventure and offered to host a true knowledge city, near Geneva. The set was dominated by a square spiral announcing the unlimited growth museum. But this project did not yet have the technology to bring it to term was quickly overwhelmed by the exponential mass publications of the last century. Abandoned in 1934, the archives were then randomly dispersed in several different sites, some lost forever. Recognized as the precursor of the search engines, the Mundaneum resurfaced in Mons in 1998. The ruins of its collections have been restored and have since that date made by rolling in a former Art Deco commercial building consists of three superimposed galleries surrounding a central vacuum. The set design of this space was entrusted to Schuiten designer who was able to capture this universe to his measure. It has uniformly covered the side walls with wooden cabinets containing the famous sheets and placed a huge globe under the glass roof, hidden by a fresco.
TWO FLOORS
To better store non-public reserves, receive worthily accommodate researchers and schoolchildren, it was quickly decided to extend the premises of the museum by transforming the courtyard and annex served by a back street below. The approach of the three architects - Coton_Lelion_Nottebaert - can primarily be seen as an articulation of the two grade levels work: the floor of the street and the front of the back street. Thus the first floor corresponding to the ground floor of the exhibition hall is followed by a plateau that descends brick left by a ramp to the service road. While the second part of the service road and passes under the mass of brick Annex rehabilitated, the base was elegantly replaced by a plain concrete structure. He slides under the floor of the court to compose a table servant who joined the museum's basement to store kilometers of non-public archives. This implacable system is completed by three elements that accentuate its readability. : An English court which reveals the foundations of the schedule, much like these excavations placed in front of old buildings; artistic intervention of Richard Venlet who dug a well glazed to see the importance of the court archives buried; Finally, articulating the plate brick main building, a building that is strikingly strange classicism. It hosts the activity rooms school and ends with an amazing viewpoint. These three levels carried by randomly aligned or staggered columns give it a very suitable contemporaneous expression of the superposition of orders. More than a courtyard space that communicates through an infinite number of gates with the ground floor of the large exhibition hall itself as an open air living room for exhibitions and receptions. He knows how to fake Italian air space, dreamed and reinterpreted, with its central well and palaces, Gothic and Renaissance face.
Richard Scoffier
