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A visit to the old military barracks converted into the Usquare Campus in the university hub of Brussels.

The Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) have teamed up to create an open space for students and the community called Usquare Campus. What were once military barracks are now classrooms, conference rooms, and soon to be apartments. The architects have taken a more circular approach to this project, trying to incorporate as many sustainable practices as possible. They have recycled as many existing materials on the site to reduce their waste output. The architects have been aware and keeping track of the input and output of materials and are trying to keep it as sustainable as possible. For this piece, REVOLVE spoke with Christopher Wejchert, an architect working on the project. 

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“The USquare site is on old military barracks. It’s that whole plot [of land] actually, sort of like an urban island that was built in the, I’d say late 1800s. It was a military complex during WWI and WWII, then after WWII the police moved into the whole complex.

By the 1990s the police moved out and it was pretty much abandoned. The police remained in some of the buildings but for the most part it was empty. This big urban island with so much potential in the centre of Brussels was just waiting for something to happen.” 
“I think the whole idea of USquare is to create this university square on the site. A mixture of functions for students but also for people in the neighborhood to really open it up because it’s been a closed-walled complex for many years.” 
“There are a lot of offices, conference rooms, meeting rooms, and then a big entrance hall that’s just more of an open space that can take on different functions, such as a big presentation or party hall.” 
“I think there’s a need for more facilities in that area, like student facilities, and I think that they both [ULB and VUB] saw it as an opportunity to be involved in an exciting project that isn’t just a campus, but also part of the city, so it’s trying to mix the two together.” 
“There are many different approaches you can take with sustainable buildings. The first thing we tried to do was preserve as much from the original as possible. For this, we challenged the original brief, in the sense that they wanted us to demolish some more parts, or some specific parts that we thought were worth keeping.” 
“Rather than completely getting rid of the building, we tried to keep some of its memory – it is almost like an intelligent ruin; we tried to keep some memory of the past. Maintaining the walls and existing foundations is a more sustainable gesture because otherwise you would need to start building more with concrete and bring big amounts of materials in. We try to have as few coming in and as few going out.” 
“Another approach was trying to limit the flow coming in by keeping what was there and then also in terms of reducing the flow going out, we recuperated a lot of building materials. This refers to materials like brick, marble windowsills, etc.” 
“When you enter from the street level there is this pattern on the floor, it’s a stoney floor and the black elements you see are actually a combination of the old windowsills from many of the different buildings.” 
“The geothermal heating has already been installed under the main square in the center of the site. The idea behind that is, when all the phases of the site are complete, all the buildings on the site will be able to connect to this heat network. This onsite heat network draws on the energy from the geothermal system.” 
“The plan is to put photovoltaic (PV) panels on that roof [the horse-riding arena] because it is in a better position. Again, it is at the center of the site so once the PV panels are there, they should be able to feed the whole of USquare.” 
“It was, in a way, the first project of its kind in Brussels. We ran into quite some hurdles along the way, but a lot of them will be lessons learned for future projects. It looks like in the future more projects will go down this path of being more circular by reusing materials on site and being more aware of the flows of materials going in and the flows of waste going out. It was sort of a test project that hopefully can set a precedent for the future.” 

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