Learning

Background
As urban planning develops in Beijing, urban renewal gradually spreads from the center to the suburban Beizhuang Town. The project site was originally a garment manufacturing factory covering an area of 5,000 sqm in Beizhuang Town. We have retained the original layout of factory buildings, and renovated it into a youth activity center which is comprised of youth education camps along with classroom, restaurant, conference room, and accommodations. The site is divided into two courtyards. The northern one is featured by a large one-story single-span factory building with a bent structure. In the southern one there are small red brick buildings with timber trusses and brick bearing walls. Considering the structural characteristics of the original fabrics, we concentrated the education camps, conference rooms and restaurants in the northern area, and accommodations in the southern one.

In Bressanone (South Tyrol, Italy), MoDusArchitects adopts a subtle design strategy for the renovation of and addition to the Cusanus Academy, a center of learning dedicated to the exchange of ideas at the intersection of the religious and secular worlds. For the purpose of better engaging the Academy with the city, the project tackles the heterogeneous ensemble of seminar venues and guest accommodations with a spectrum of interventions—mimetic to overtly new—that form a more organically connected complex that invites the community in.

About twenty years ago arts center nOna in Mechelen suffered from a lack of space. The existing Art-deco theatre hall had its limits and was no longer sufficient in terms of flexibility. In 1999 they had the idea to build a second theatre hall on the adjacent printing business site. In the meantime, the printing factory was transformed into three temporary rehearsal rooms for artists in need, called nOva. In 2016 the actual renovation and building of the extension of arts centre nOna started. The project fits in the urban planning of the city of Mechelen to boost the cultural axis between the Grand Place and the congress center Lamot. The site is situated in the middle of a block with a medieval alley that literally separates the new and old site. The new extension got embedded in the urban fabric by the succession of interior and exterior rooms with their own materiality and atmosphere.