Holland’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has designed a headquarters for Belgium’s national railway company (SNCB) in Brussels.
Located in three vacant buildings in the Brussels-South train station, the headquarters will add an 11-storey, 236m-long volume beside the tracks.
The 75,000 sq m development will bring all of SNCB’s 4,000 employees under the same roof.
On the ground floor, a three-storey entrance lobby and retail spaces will help "inject new life into the neighbourhood", and the offices will have a fitness centre, a 200-seat auditorium, a restaurant and rooftop gardens.
Reinier de Graaf, a partner in OMA, said: "Contemporary Brussels is both historic and modern, national and European, regional and cosmopolitan. That is its essence – the mediation between presumed opposites.
"It is this reality that our project intends to express. It is borne out of the creative tension between an expectation for the future, and a respect for futures past."
OMA worked with Brussels’ firm Jaspers-Eyers Architects on the project’s consortium of Besix Group, BPC/BPI and Immobel.
Images courtesy of OMA/Luxigon
