BLAF Architecten Crafts a Striking Oasis with House WST in Ternat

BLAF Architect is renowned for their experimental houses, such as wsT House, in Flanders and beyond. Their research focuses on building high-performance, sustainable houses that consider the relationship between material, construction, and context. Since the introduction of energy performance standards in 2006, thermal insulation in building skins has become thicker, leading to the use of light and low-cost facade cladding materials such as plaster, scales, tiles, and textiles. This shift is also evident in BLAF's experimental production. For brick buildings, this has meant an evolution towards brick tiles glued onto buildings as ‘exterior wallpaper’. BLAF recognized that this construction method would make it impossible to separate the materials at the end of the building’s life cycle, resulting in large amounts of non-reusable waste. Additionally, this evolution has led to new aesthetics, with tectonic expressions no longer resulting from stacking bricks, and a recalibrated position of the architect towards the design of the building elevation. As a result, BLAF has created a series of brick houses that explore hybrid construction and the development of the new ‘Big Brick’.

The wsT house is one of the first three houses in a series where architects explore the use of BLAF-brick 1.0 and the shape of the shell for its autonomy. Located on a hill in the centre of Sint-Katherina-Lombeek, near the Ternat station, the house has a parallel façade to the street, and its right façade is also parallel to the oblique (120°) lateral plot boundaries. This creates an equilateral triangular floorplan, with tip façades connected by a sloping roof. The structure is a wooden skeleton, three storeys high, with three different bearing directions, and the open floor plans are polyvalent completed. The brick shell is built around the timber frame and is self-supporting due to its shape. This shell, along with the wooden insulated walls, forms an extremely high-performance shell for the house. The house is constructed in a hybrid and traditional way, referring to pre-industrial building methods, but according to current and future standards. The interior construction is a prefab wooden 'columns and beams' structure with mortise and tenon joints, and the outer construction is a self-supporting brick from Wienerberger, the BLAF Big Brick 1.0. This hybrid construction provides an ecological and extremely energetically efficient outer shell, which makes it possible to limit energy demand, met in a low-tech way with a compact unit from Pichler.