This proposal envisages a space which relates to the West end of one of the cities squares, and which will form a new urban focus for the cultural life of Kortrijk. The southern wing of the poorly placed, 1960’s Musik Centrum building is removed allowing the physical and visual connection of the site to the city. The new buildings seeks to visually subsume the existing object buildings of the Kreun and the Musik Centrum into an ensemble of complementary forms. New routes which cut through the site offer the allow the potential for the building to act as a physical and visual connection between the historic centre, the new master plan to the West and potential developments to the South of the railway.

Whilst the urban form of the building refers to the grain of the city and to the scale and geometries established by the site and its surroundings, it is also defined through the infrastructural rhythms of the vast parking garage that sits below it. A two way spanning structure, forming a soffit of interconnecting equilateral triangles, responds to the predetermined requirements of an efficient parking layout. This strong, rhythmical ceiling repeats within the building above, ordering the proportions and arrangements of the accommodation for both the Bibliotek and the Learning Centre.

The building comprises a number of programmatic elements. These are housed within two counterpointed typologies of space.

Those spaces with a multi-purpose character, including the library book stacks, are housed within a mat of accommodation, which spreads to the edges of the site, defining the building as an urban block. A series of patios are cut into this mat, bringing light and air into the heart of the plan and offering points of orientation around which clusters of rooms congregate. At least one face of each patio becomes the façade of a pavilion. These sit on the roof landscape of the building and house a number of more specialist functions and programmes including the Youth Library, Reading Room, Creche and a suite of music and dance studio spaces. The roof becomes the fifth elevation of the building, an activated landscape, which each of the pavilions has access to. The pavilions are the negative of the spaces clustered around patios on the lower floors. Instead they are objects standing within a landscape, with views across the city.