Designing encounter in educational infrastructure / festive opening of Campus Jette (Erasmushogeschool Brussel)

Architecture cannot enforce collaboration, but it can invite it. That was the message of Jef Van Loock, Team Manager at POLO Labs, at the start of the academic year at Campus Jette, where Erasmushogeschool Brussel (EhB) welcomed students back. 

The story of Campus Jette starts with a 1980s campus that had come apart at the seams: a patchwork of buildings that was hard to read, while education itself was moving towards flexibility, collaboration and hands-on learning. The challenge went far beyond a lick of paint. It was to weave many buildings back into one campus.

Educational infrastructure does not dictate how education should be delivered; it creates the physical conditions in which encounter, diversity, collaboration and change become possible.

The thread that ties it all together is The Loop, the spatial backbone of the 2021 competition design. But the real idea is not the shape, it is the principle: a corridor should be more than a way to get from A to B. It becomes a place to sit, study, wait, watch the world go by, or run into someone by chance.

Under one roof, and around it, labs, skills labs, health programmes, Landscape and Garden Architecture, EhB, VUB and UZ Brussel each have their own needs. The design does not press them into one mould. It offers a shared framework in which everyone finds their own place.

Years of testing against user needs, budget, logistics, asbestos and the existing structure trimmed the competition concept down to its core. The great bridge shrank, but the ambition stood firm. The Loop shifted from object to principle.

The aim was not to design 'the school of the future', but a campus that can absorb multiple futures and accommodate change without losing its spatial logic.

Architecture in collaboration with Archipelago

Engineering by SWECO