Brepols Printing House, one of Turnhout's best-known printing companies, moved to a new location outside the city. This freed up the historic site and turned it into a place for culture.

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The new site

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Central to this plan is the creation of a new art school that brings together two existing academies (music, word and dance on the one hand; visual arts on the other) into one new school.

The academy should fulfill the reconversion of two valuable buildings of the printing house. The interwar office building, classified as a monument, will house the central functions of the school and a spacious multipurpose arts hall.

A factory hall with characteristic concrete structure from the same period is being renovated into studios for the visual arts departments. An expressive new building provides performance classrooms for the music, word and dance departments.

In the design of the new academy, special attention is paid to the layout of the circulation space. Efforts are made to transcend a purely functional scheme: the circulation space is more than the strictly necessary corridors to access the various classrooms. Space is made for meeting places with different atmospheres. At level 1, room is made for a circulation space as an "internal agora," a central space where all the arts meet and from which the pathways to the various sub-disciplines depart.

The design for Turnhout's new urban art academy strives - both in the reconversion part and in the new construction part - to let the spirit of the recovered printing buildings speak for itself. Thus, the entire academy is conceived as a "creative factory" where a rational yet striking structure, together with a rhythm in facade solutions and light incidence, characterize the spaces.

(Source: Wit Architecten)

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For more info contact Eddy De Baets: 050/40 45 30 or at eddy.debaets@ingenium.be.