Reinventing reuse
We breathe new life into the seemingly obsolete through the transformative power of creative re-conceptualisation.
Demolition is often a kind of defeat, a failure of design. It can be a retroactive damnation of shortsightedness in the past or evidence of a lack of creativity in the present.
We pride ourselves on extracting the maximum value out of existing situations, no matter how desperately unpromising. This means examining yesterday’s rationale for an existing space; critically evaluating present programmes and design approaches; and anticipating future wants and needs in participative trajectories with clients and end users. We are the catalyst bringing yesterday up to date with tomorrow, the midwife delivering the past kicking and screaming into the future.
In a country as under-planned and over-built as Belgium, all of us — architect, urbanist, interior designer — are like surgeons, working with and within existing tissue. This has become a most valuable skill in a world of depleting resources and dwindling availability of open space. Wherever our projects are, working with the “already there” has become an ever more pressing civic duty for us at POLO.
We pride ourselves on extracting the maximum value out of existing situations, no matter how desperately unpromising. This means examining yesterday’s rationale for an existing space; critically evaluating present programmes and design approaches; and anticipating future wants and needs in participative trajectories with clients and end users. We are the catalyst bringing yesterday up to date with tomorrow, the midwife delivering the past kicking and screaming into the future.
In a country as under-planned and over-built as Belgium, all of us — architect, urbanist, interior designer — are like surgeons, working with and within existing tissue. This has become a most valuable skill in a world of depleting resources and dwindling availability of open space. Wherever our projects are, working with the “already there” has become an ever more pressing civic duty for us at POLO.