Hall of the Wiels Museum

Project: Hall of the Wiels Museum
Architect: Piovenefabi

Programme

This project is about the reorganization of the entrance of the Wiels museum in Brussels by adding a new bookstore, a ticket counter and a cafeteria.

The entrance hall is an old brewery hall, a big historical space both seen as a large room delimited by high windows and a public space surrounded by the city.

The interventions we worked on, the bookstore - ticket counter and the café counter are an attempt to react both to the idea of a room and to the one of the piazza. They are consciously placed at the ambiguous boundaries among object and architecture, being big pieces of furniture and very small pavillons at once. The red «Wiels Circle» which contains the bookshop and ticket counter is a circular perimeter coinciding with the round trace of one of the old brewery tanks that once occupied the hall.

The circle is made by adding a repetitive modular frame, while a metal net dresses the structure giving a textile transparency to the whole form.
The red color is a way to enhance the historical materialities of the hall by complementarity the green and the black of the historical tiles covering floors and walls get brighter, more visible.

The ticket counter is accessible from the outside, like a kiosk; a set of sliding doors open and close allowing the access inside the perimeter.

The questions of assembling and displaying is the occasion to imagine a specific language where the screws and the books need to be placed.

The Wiels café is a linear plinth supporting and containing the machines of the bar.
A dense yellow structure, as support to the big weight to be carried, defines the rhythm of the rectangular counter and becomes the first visible element. The structure is then filled with tiles providing a steady and washable surface. On top of the plinth, vitrines, shelves, paravents, neon lights, formal signs come together as a sort of still life. In front of the counter a long wooden profile welcome the public, allowing to hang over.