An Fonteyne: KANAL - A Great Good Place

KANAL - A Great Good Place

The former Citroën car factory (built 1933-34), composed of an iconic Showroom and a large factory space behind it, is being transformed into KANAL: a generous public interior focusing on cultural production, housing visual arts and architecture, dance, drama, film, and music. KANAL will be a meeting place for the diverse neighbourhood and wider city of which it is a part. We might call it a Third Place as was originally formulated by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book ‘The Great Good Place’ to refer to public spaces where people spend time other than home (the first place) and work or school (the second place), a familiar place without the necessity of consumption. This Third Place invites citizens, organisations, collectives and communities to appropriate and inhabit large parts of the building; for production, performances, events or informal gatherings. The ‘museum’ no longer belongs only to curated art but becomes part of the city and its fabric. In this sense, KANAL departs from the traditional museum and instead offers a place of civic gathering responding to an increasing absence of shared public spaces in our cities today.

KANAL is an exemplar of reuse. The former Citroën car factory has been our starting point as found. Located alongside the canal and in walking distance of Brussels’ city centre, a building of this scale (100 × 200 metres) offers unmatched opportunities that would be difficult to achieve with a new building. Rather than a spectacular gesture, our proposal offers an attitude of Radical Optimism – open and nonprescriptive, spontaneous and instinctive – much like the spirit of modern progress in which it was created. In so doing we allow the original building to become once again a key protagonist in the city. 

An Fonteyne (1971) is an architect and professor of Affective Architectures at ETH Zurich. She grew up in Ostend (Belgium) and graduated as an architect at Ghent University in 1994. She worked at DKV architecten in Rotterdam and David Chipperfield architects in London. In 2000 she founded Brussels-based noAarchitecten together with Jitse van den Berg and Philippe Viérin.  noAarchitecten is a team of around twenty people working on a diverse range of projects including housing, public buildings, urban transformations, healthcare and technical infrastructures in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland.

From early on, the practice has had the chance to concentrate on working with existing buildings for public programmes. In the early 2000s, when a focus on the transformation of buildings was still a marginal practice within architecture, they developed a personal approach that combines craftsmanship, technical knowledge and a love for narrative and historiography. noAarchitecten strives to take care also of future generations, producing buildings and spaces with an intelligence that allows them to adopt to future needs. Contextual continuity and a broad understanding of sustainability, in technical, cultural and social terms, are directive in creating conscious and critical projects, whilst striving for inclusive and accessible urban conditions. As such, noAarchitecten is equally interested in what architecture can be, as in what it can do. In finding relevant answers to complex questions, noAarchitecten likes to build coalitions with disciplines outside the field of architecture: artists, scenographers, social organisations, experts, but also daily users helping to consider often overlooked criteria, that can offer a contemporary understanding of the world we live in.

The lecture takes place as part of the IKA Lecture Series Summer 2026 curated by Thilo Folkerts and Christina Condak.

Further lectures:
18.5.2026: Lilli Licka, Wien: reale/non reale – methods of civil landscape engagement for Westbahnpark
8.6.2026: Krater, Ljubljana: Krater Model: Toward Urban Ecological Regeneration through Culture