The Hasselt Beguinage is the largest green public space within the historic town center. Once a secluded sanctuary primarily designed to exclude the city, it now becomes an inviting public space. The project aims to foster a dynamic interplay between its rich heritage and a vibrant, community-focused future, welcoming students, residents, and regional visitors alike to engage with this revitalised urban landscape.
The dialogue between landscape and architecture is pivotal to the identity of the site. Within the public garden, the footprint of the former church has been reimagined as a serene reflecting pool, a place of contemplation that gives the historic ruin a new, active role in the daily life of the site. With engineered adaptability, the pool can be drained to transform the footprint into a versatile stage for university events and public performances.
Amidst the careful refurbishment of historic structures, a new architectural form emerges, making a bold statement. The 26 meter panoramic belvedere, a slender tower in the southern corner, rises gracefully above the enclosure wall, reaching to a similar height to that of the original church. This deliberate intervention is more than an observation point. It is a confident architectural gesture about the dynamic relationship between past and present. It re-establishes the Beguinage’s centrality within Hasselt’s skyline and acts as a new urban beacon – a wayfinder for visitors and a symbol of the site’s new public purpose.
The refurbishment of the historic terraced houses demonstrates a nuanced approach to adaptive re-use, seeking to recover the original domestic character while accommodating a new academic programme. Life within the refurbished houses now reinstates the former sequence from public to private, leading one from the collective life of the courtyard and garden, through the shared kitchen gardens, to the intimacy of smaller rooms.
A key aspect of this contemporary intervention emerges from the friction between the public sphere of the University programme and the historic character of the small beguinage houses. Multiple interventions try to restore or evoke lost layers of the beguinage history whilst simultaneously adapting the houses to a future of public use.
This strategy leans strongly on the use and reuse of traditional materials which are already found on site: oak furniture, locally produced brown purple brick, clay flooring and bluestone ornaments. Throughout the design, repair has been favoured over replacement, leading to delicate operations to retain parts of balustrades, stairs windows and doors.