Destrier

Project: Destrier
Architect: Pierre Blondel Architectes

Programme

DESTRIER / Big and together

Large in terms of the number of units, Together through the creation of a series of community spaces.
The Destrier project is part of an ambitious approach to urban transformation, combining housing, community facilities and landscaping. It aims to recreate a link between one of Brussels' main roads and a changing, heterogeneous neighborhood, next to a garden city, by fostering the emergence of a new local centrality.

Housing for all

130 low- and medium-income housing units, designed to offer a diversity of uses and living styles, integrated into a neighborhood-scale complex.

The housing is organized into 13 independent, semi-detached buildings to facilitate links between residents.

Around fifty different types of apartments (duplexes with private gardens, through-view apartments with loggias, 1 or 2-bedroom simplexes adapted for disabled people, etc.) promote a social and generational mix.

Spaces for meeting and sharing

The “Maison Destrier” community hall, the heart of the project, designed as a modular space opened to the neighborhood.
A public passageway and social areas, connecting the garden city and the Chaussée de Louvain via safe pedestrian and cycling paths.
Five gardens and a collective kitchen garden, supporting local initiatives in urban agriculture and biodiversity.

A structuring project for public space

The redevelopment of avenue du Destrier into a shared space, integrating soft mobility and limiting the impact of cars.
A public passageway, a new link for pedestrians and cyclists, new porosity through the urban fabric.
A preserved and enriched plant network, promoting a calmer, more resilient living environment.

About: Situated at the crossroads of several built-up areas (Destrier garden city, large warehouses and R+3 to R+7 buildings on the Chaussée de Louvain), Destrier aims to revive the fundamental principles of humanist urbanism: a project on the scale of the inhabitant, where architecture dialogues with its environment and uses.
The site, today marked by a heterogeneity of sizes and typologies, suffers from a lack of legibility and spatial discontinuity. Destrier weaves a new urban narrative, reconciling the built fabric with its context while asserting its own identity.
A balance between continuity and opening
The project adopts a folded ribbon volumetric strategy, enabling fluid articulation between the built alignment and more open sequences, thus creating urban breathing spaces. This layout meets the challenges of housing orientation, optimizing solar gain and the quality of views. It also favors intermediate spaces, at the crossroads between public and private, to encourage conviviality and ownership of the site.
A dialogue with nature
The organization of the project is guided by the preservation of the large existing trees, real landscape landmarks. The whole complex opens onto a central planted walkway, a contemporary reinterpretation of the principles of the garden city, linking the various activity hubs.