Brusilia
“loftisation” of a modernist apartment on the 29th floor of a tower.
Living on a 29th floor in Brussels is a rather unique and paradoxical condition. The breathtaking view on the city enthralls you in every room, generating a sense of luxury, an unwavering quality for the apartment. Yet, the banal, claustrophobic spatial layout of the apartment frustrates this potential quality, leaving the inhabitants to look in vain for ornamentations, furniture or layouts that could counter the fundamental inadequacy between the brutal and simple force of the view – the city landscape – and the labyrinthine, stuffy and shy character of the apartment.
Countering this inadequacy requires more than cosmetic furniture. A radical rescaling of the apartment is put in place. All non-bearing walls are removed in order to produce one fluid space, suspended in-between the two horizons of the extending landscape. The remaining central core is wrapped in a unified texture, and along with it three other static pieces of fixed furniture are strategically placed in the space. Their position and interaction generate the conditions for use, subdivision and recomposition of the apartment in a variety of formal and informal ways.
Through a limited amount of interventions, the apartment itself becomes a condensed essence of urbanity with its centers, passages, niches and corners; in order for the city to be in the apartment as much as the apartment is in the city.
