Tutors: Christian Nolf and Ignacio Galan
Campus: Ghent
Language: EN
Engagement: Urban Cultures
MArG14 2024-25: Semester 1
Background. 600ha KU Leuven.
In 2025, KU Leuven celebrates the 600th anniversary of its foundation. During these centuries, the university has evolved and grown, acquiring a vast land domain of more than 600 hectares and extending its campuses to 13 Belgian cities. This large patrimony provides our university, as well as many other educational institutions, a privileged position as potential key actors in city development. However, this also represents an important responsibility towards the citizens and users of these facilities to address urgent urban questions. Educational institutions, as large landowners, have the capacity to tackle many of the shifting sociocultural, economic, and environmental challenges that our cities face, including equal access to public services and open spaces, housing, urban productivity, climate change and pollution, water issues, and the decrease in biodiversity.
Universities are also rapidly changing. Over the past years, we have observed a growing number of students, shortage of student housing and facilities, and significant evolutions in teaching and learning methods, such as online or hybrid education. Universities have only limited means to maintain their campuses and to deal with these changing needs.
In this context, the Department of Architecture launched an initiative to explore the theme of City and University through several design studios, elective courses, and workshops. In 2025, an exhibition, lecture series, and other activities will present and reflect upon the results of these explorations.
Studio Context The heterogeneous urban fabric of Ghent.
The Studio Architecture and Territory 2024-2025 will take the historic centre of Ghent as a study area to explore ways the university can continue actively integrating and positively influencing the city. We will investigate the capacity of educational campuses to establish more meaningful relations with their surrounding neighbourhoods in the future. This exploration will be guided by two complementary questions: What will be the spatial needs of higher education in the coming decades? Conversely, which functions will disappear from the city centre, freeing up spaces for reappropriation? A third question, merging the former two, is how can the university’s missions for research, education and societal impact be enriched by the urban environment and, in return, enhance the urban communities and citizens’ lives?
Ghent’s streets and blocks, shaped by the winding meanders of the Lys and the Scheldt, have remained unchanged for centuries. However, the built elements composing these blocks are highly diverse and adaptive. A typical Ghent block combines housing with shops, workshops, a church, a school, or a concert hall in relative harmony. Moreover, many of these functions take place in buildings originally designed for other purposes. In Ghent, you’ll find a hotel in a monastery, coworking spaces in former warehouses, a café in a former library, and a library in an old church. These buildings from different types and generations together form a highly heterogeneous and adaptive urban fabric.
Higher education institutions, notably the University of Ghent, HOGent, Artevelde, KU Leuven and the art schools of Sint Lucas, have played an active role in this continuous adaptive reuse process. Responding to faculty rearrangements, a growing student population, and evolving teaching methods, these institutions have opportunistically reclaimed and repurposed available spaces, temporarily or definitively. KU Leuven campuses, in particular, are found in very different types of settings: a former convent, office spaces, an old industrial site, a hospital, and, more recently, a former car garage and showroom.
While Ghent University (UGent) has decided to relocate its infrastructure into three large monofunctional clusters south of the city, it is assumed that KU Leuven/Sint Lucas/LUCA will maintain their presence in the historic city centre. The scattered constellation of KU Leuven in campuses of diverse sizes and configurations might not be optimal from a management and logistic point of view. However, it allows the university to benefit from a stimulating urban environment and, conversely, to contribute with its activities and students to a vibrant and inclusive city.
Studio focus: city-campus interaction
The Studio Architecture and Territory 2024-2025 will focus on collective spaces, both outdoor and indoor. As mentioned above, the KU Leuven campuses in Ghent are dispersed across various types of buildings. Most of these buildings were never originally intended to become educational facilities and, in most cases, were not designed to be publicly accessible.
You will select a site, identify its urgencies, outline a spatial program of educational activities (space to arrive, to listen, to study, to experiment, to discuss, to rest, to exchange), and define to what extent (some of) these spaces can be accessible to the non-student population during on and off-peak periods (evening, weekend, and holidays).
On that basis, you will pay particular attention to the interface between the public space and the educational facilities. Not only outdoor spaces but also the access areas of the buildings—and especially their ground-floor levels—will be investigated.
The focus on the transition between public space and collective educational facilities will be paired with a reflection on other transversal and systemic urgencies at the scale of the neigbhourhood, including ecology and climate, productivity and logistics, inclusive accessibility and mobility, mixed-use neighbourhood and social interaction.