Atelier Kempe Thill

Atelier Kempe Thill won the European tender for the transformation of two nearly dilapidated modernist apartment blocks from the 1970s in the Rozemaai district of Antwerp, Belgium. In order to tackle the various urban, architectural, social, and technical problems that played out on the site, Atelier Kempe Thill decided to transform the two buildings in a fairly radical way. All façades, staircases, and the complete interior of the two buildings were demolished. The remaining concrete construction was insulated, and new stairwells, elevators and façades added. To give the dwellings a higher quality, the apartments were supplied with a full glass façade in combination with new big balconies facing the landscape park called “de Oude Landen.” In the end, the project became an “extreme makeover” of brutalist architecture: almost all historical elements were demolished or covered for various reasons, and an almost new architecture was created from an existing one. The result is a very welcome contribution to the debate about the relationship between sustainability and economy.