This master thesis explores architecture as a critical and affective engagement with complex urban contexts. Focusing on the Palais du Midi in Brussels - a place of multiple histories and cultural transitions - we examine how architectural practice can imagine new civic spaces. We will approach the present condition not just as a phase of transition, but as a moment in which time can be paused, reconfigured, and re-imagined. We will not develop proposals that merely sit within a context, but that actively construct and interrogate it.
Palais
The Palais du Midi is a former covered market in the centre of Brussels, built in 1875 for the 'Compagnie Générale des Marchés', who commissioned the Palais in order to revitalise a less affluent area of the city centre. Converted into an administrative centre in the 1920s, the Palais was transformed in the 1980s into a dynamic conglomerate of commerce and community spaces such as a sports complex and an art and music school. Today, the ongoing construction of the nearby Metro Line 3 has unexpectedly been halted due to underground conditions close to the Palais. This has led to the decision to reroute the line, requiring the demolition of the Palais, except for its facades. Heading towards an ongoing social and economic disaster for the neighbourhood and another loss for Brussels' heritage, we wonder: can we discover opportunities in this drastic situation and use architecture as an agent of positive change?
Context as Construction
We begin with the idea that context is not fixed—it is shaped by people, time, memory, and personal interpretation. As architects, we do not simply respond to context; we engage in its ongoing construction. To do so, we will foster a layered understanding of historical, social, and spatial forces that have shaped the Palais. Studying past urban ambitions, architectural languages and spatial transformations will be complemented with an engagement with inhabitants and passersby to interweave our findings in formal architectural or historical records with the oral histories of individual lives, the collective memory, and the emotional resonances with urban trauma.
Histories, Loss, and the City as an Organism
Cities change through loss as much as through construction. Buildings disappear, histories are rewritten, and communities evolve. Loss is a shared urban experience—be it the demolition of buildings, the erasure of cultural memory, or the vanishing of public spaces. We will work with these gaps, omissions, and transitions—not as problems to solve, but as opportunities for intervention.
This approach to design acknowledges the city as an organism. Urban life often unfolds outside centralized planning or regulation, shaped instead by local dynamics and communities. Architecture, then, is not simply a tool for control or order—it can also resist and respond to change, acting as a force that reflects contemporary realities while offering space for negotiation and belonging.
Memory and Speculation in Design
Memory is a material—intangible but powerful. We will explore how architecture can make the invisible visible, how it can evoke what has been lost, and how it might hold space for collective remembrance. We will explore how buildings can contain echoes of other times, and discover the surprising interference of absence and presence as a design tool. We will rethink the future of the Palais, reflect on facadism as a contradictory form of conservation and on how to redesign relevant content, when all that matters seems to be gone. We will be radically optimistic and see architecture as a discipline of connection and imagination.
with questions, please contact recker@arch.ethz.ch