M - garden pavilion
Nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2017.
The pavilion "M" for an art collector is designed as an additional exhibition space to an existing villa in order to expose more works.
The site is remarkable: a plateau overlooking the great landscape of the Flemish Ardennes and flanked by a small forest below. The design aspires to immerse in its context through its implementation, volumetrics and materials. This results in a low building, covered with dark walls of oiled wood, that disappears behind the thick foliage of vegetation and trees.
The project plays with this ambivalence between the outer facade, raw and rough one hand, interior, refined and valuable, on the other. Manipulating the volume (a simple "twist") creates two related spaces, an exhibition space and workshop room) and for both spaces the garden is their overwhelming focal point.