A building that faces a new future as an Open City Studio, while simultaneously holding an important place in the city’s architectural history. This former Amival industrial building, established in 1967, is the first realised industrial design by Atelier Vanhout-Schellekens, and is now recognised as a powerful example of brutalist architecture in the Campine region.
At the time, the building radically broke with traditional industrial typology. Carli and Paul experimented for the first time with cellular concrete panels – an innovative material for that era – and chose to make the load-bearing structure explicitly visible on the exterior. What seemed revolutionary then is now recognized as a groundbreaking reinterpretation of classical industrial construction, emphasizing honesty, rhythm and functionality. Five years earlier, they had already designed an initial version that even incorporated part of the adjacent Beguinage into the project, but that proposal was never executed.
For many years, the building served as a workplace for Amival VZW, a social enterprise for people with disabilities, and later as a location for the Municipal Academy of Fine Arts. Today, the building is temporarily managed by the artist collective Creative Factory, and, in the lead up to 2027, work is underway to transform it into a fully-fledged Open City Studio: an independent, shared workspace and meeting place for artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs.
