Conversion of 4 apartments into two residential units

The current situation of the Cité Moderne is symptomatic of Brussels’ garden cities. The entire Cité (270 homes and a wide range of housing types) is of a great quality, both in terms of its architectural and spatial composition and its rational construction. This architectural richness and the classification that is intended to ensure the long-term coherence of the entire estate are at odds with current requirements and standards of habitability and comfort in many respects – too small living rooms, non-existent kitchens and bathrooms, inadequate heating, no water supply, no insulation, construction that is dated and in poor condition, etc. On top of this, there is demand for large housing units from the SISP, and the need to comply with current regulations.

The buildings undergoing this renovation have an atypical typology developed by Victor Bourgeois: the Bovenhuizen. A two-bedroom flat is located above a duplex three-bedroom flat, which itself resembles a small workers’ house with a ground floor and first floor. Each unit has a separate entrance, with the stairwell of the upper flat only serving that flat. This makes for an original layout comprising two stairwells per building, on a compact rectangular plan.

The project consists of the restoration of the listed elements, the façades, the roof and the surroundings, using the most delicate approach possible, and the interior transformation aimed at combining the two superimposed units into a single-family house. The four existing units making up 10 small bedrooms become two neighbouring units, each with four bedrooms, including one double. This complete but measured reconfiguration of the interior spaces, following the principles of distribution and composition that characterise these homes, while decompartmentalising and grouping certain units together, seems to us to correspond to the ambition of a renovation that could be progressively repeated in the Cité in order to give a new life, as long and as sustainable as possible, to the Cité Moderne.