NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte and Kris Broidioi Strip a School Atelier Down to Its Bare Essentials in Ostend

When a five-story school building in Ostend sank into poor subsoil and was condemned, the question wasn't just what to build next but how little you could build and still deliver everything a technical school needs. NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte and Kris Broidioi answered with Atelier PPW, a 2,500 m² structure on the VTI Oostende campus that treats reduction as a design method rather than a constraint. The building houses workshop space for building courses and a studio for painting courses inside a column-and-beam frame of washed red concrete, clad in glass, green steel, and reclaimed brick, and it reads as an exploded diagram of its own construction logic.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is its refusal to hide anything. Circulation sits outside the envelope. Structure is pigmented the brick-red of the neighborhood it replaces. The green steel staircases and walkways that stitch the new building to its neighbors are frankly expressed as additions bolted onto the concrete skeleton. Even the interior partitions are off-the-shelf systems that students and teachers can rearrange. The result is a building that functions as a teaching tool about construction itself, which seems exactly right for a technical school.

A Red Frame in Context

Seen from the street, Atelier PPW announces its structural logic immediately. The washed red concrete columns and beams form a rhythmic grid across the facade, their pigment matched to the brick of surrounding buildings. It is a deliberate chromatic decision: the demolished structure was brick, and the new concrete frame carries that memory forward without pretending to be something it isn't. Full-height glazing fills the bays between columns, turning the ground floor into a lantern that draws the eye through to the courtyard behind.

Flanking the main volume, two vertical towers clad in green steel fins act as circulation cores and solar screens. They give the long, horizontal building a pair of anchors that break its linearity and announce the entrances. Against the grey Ostend sky and the modest brick terraces next door, the color contrast is precise rather than loud: red concrete for gravity, green steel for movement.

Green Steel and External Circulation

The most striking tactical move is pushing all circulation outside the building envelope. Staircases, walkways, and vertical cores are rendered in bright green steel and wire mesh, wrapping around the exterior like an exoskeleton. This is not decoration. Externalizing movement routes minimizes the conditioned volume inside, reduces the building's energy footprint, and keeps the floor plates free for teaching. It also means the main glass volumes stay uncluttered, their interiors legible from outside.

The external deck and stairs do double duty as connectors, linking Atelier PPW to two neighboring campus buildings and unifying them around a central courtyard. Complex height differences between the structures are absorbed by the two vertical cores, so that what might have been an awkward collision of rooflines becomes a continuous circulation loop. Students cross from building to building at multiple levels, turning the campus into a single connected organism.

The Courtyard as Campus Heart

A large opening at ground level forms a covered entrance that threads the street directly through to the school courtyard, blurring the boundary between public pavement and institutional interior. The southern canopy extends outward, managing solar gain while supporting a planted screen that begins the transformation of what was once an entirely mineral playground into something greener and softer. Rooftop planting beds visible from the elevated walkways reinforce the ambition: this is infrastructure for landscape as much as for education.

The courtyard itself becomes an informal gathering zone, framed on one side by the green louvered facade and on the other by existing campus buildings. Students spill out below the glazed walkway, and the covered ground floor acts as a threshold, neither fully inside nor fully outside. It is a social valve that gives the school a proper address while keeping the campus permeable.

Open Floor Plates and Movable Walls

Inside, the ground floor is a double-height atelier divided only by a row of concrete columns. Polished concrete floors, steel columns, and continuous glazed facades create a workshop space that feels more like a hangar than a classroom, which is exactly the point for building courses that involve full-scale construction. Daylight enters from both long sides, and the column grid is spaced generously enough to accommodate large-format work.

Upper floors shift to a finer grain. The first-floor classrooms are divided by reconfigurable partition walls, off-the-shelf systems that teachers and students can slide into new positions as course needs change. The top floor houses a series of smaller workshop spaces for painting and detailed work. Cork-clad columns and red-framed glazed partitions give these corridors a warmer material register than the spartan ground floor, signaling the transition from heavy construction below to finer craft above.

Materiality as Diagram

The architects describe the color palette as a diagram of two contrasting construction methods working together, and it is hard to disagree. Red marks the poured-in-place concrete skeleton: columns, beams, window mullions. Green marks the bolted-on steel additions: staircases, louvres, grated walkways. Reclaimed bricks appear where fireproof infill walls separate ateliers from circulation cores, adding a third material layer that ties back to the demolished building. You can read the construction sequence from the color coding alone.

The stairwell interiors reinforce this legibility. Wire mesh enclosures, exposed ductwork, and green steel framing sit openly against the existing brick party walls of the neighboring structures. Nothing is concealed behind plasterboard. The corrugated metal ceilings on the covered balconies, the grated flooring underfoot: every surface declares its assembly method. For a technical school, this transparency is pedagogical. The building teaches by showing how it was put together.

Facade Layers and Solar Control

The south-facing facade is layered rather than sealed. Mesh-paneled screens sit proud of the glass line, filtering light before it reaches the interior. The planted canopy above provides a secondary shading device that will grow denser over time, its effectiveness increasing as the vegetation matures. Rooftop planting beds add thermal mass and stormwater retention while softening the building's profile from elevated vantage points. The strategy is low-tech and patient, relying on biology rather than motorized blinds.

The precast concrete columns were engineered strong enough to support an additional floor if future enrollment demands it. That kind of structural foresight, invisible to anyone walking past, is where the reduction philosophy pays its biggest dividend. Building only what is essential today does not mean foreclosing tomorrow. The frame is ready; the infill can follow when the school needs it.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan makes the insertion strategy clear: an elongated rectangular footprint slots into an existing urban block, its long axis parallel to the street. Floor plans at each level show the progression from open atelier to subdivided classrooms to smaller workshops, with the diagonal staircase and perimeter column grid organizing every floor. The long section reveals the exposed diagonal bracing that stiffens the frame laterally, while the short section shows how the slatted roof and southern canopy work together to shelter the paved courtyard.

The detail section is particularly revealing. Callouts for encapsulation layers, thermal breaks, and internal structure show how the architects achieved a tightly insulated envelope despite the building's transparent appearance. It is a reminder that the spartan aesthetic is not the result of leaving things out but of putting things in the right places and showing only what matters.

Why This Project Matters

Atelier PPW is a quiet argument against excess. In an era when school buildings are often overdesigned with signature gestures, NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte and Kris Broidioi demonstrate that stripping a structure to its functional and structural core can produce architecture that is more legible, more adaptable, and more generous than a conventional solution. The building doesn't need a lobby sculpture or a cantilevered auditorium to announce itself. Its honesty is its identity.

More importantly, it models a sustainable approach to campus development that other institutions should study. By externalizing circulation to reduce conditioned volume, using reclaimed brick where fire codes demand mass, and engineering columns to accept a future floor, the architects have delivered a building that costs less to heat today and can grow without demolition tomorrow. For a project born from the failure of a sinking building on bad soil, that long view is both pragmatic and optimistic.

Atelier PPW, designed by NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte and Kris Broidioi. Located on the VTI Oostende campus, Ostend, Belgium. 2,500 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Johnny Umans.

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