Vi.architectuur.atelier Wraps a Ghent Village Square Office in Perforated Brick and Timber Lattice

On the village square of Zwijnaarde, a southern suburb of Ghent, a small turret building has been part of the streetscape long enough that locals likely stopped noticing it. Vi.architectuur.atelier has made it impossible to ignore again. De Zwarte Fles pairs the renovation of that existing structure with a new 480 m² office volume that sits low and deliberate beside it, wrapped in a perforated terracotta brick screen that filters light, moderates privacy, and gives the addition a civic presence without competing with its older neighbor.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is the refusal to choose a single material language. The perforated brick facade is the public face, but around the back a timber lattice screen with a bold diagonal bracing pattern takes over, mediating between the building and a planted courtyard. The two skins suggest two different relationships to context: brick toward the street, wood toward the garden. The result is an office building that reads as both institutional and intimate, depending on which side you approach from.

A Brick Screen for the Street

The new volume announces itself through a perforated terracotta brick facade raised on a concrete plinth, just high enough to separate the building from the hedge and planted beds at its base. The brick pattern is regular but not monotonous, with perforations creating a moiré effect that shifts as you walk along the cobbled street. Young trees planted in front soften the elevation and will eventually create a dappled foreground.

Critically, the addition keeps its roofline well below the turret of the existing building. The proportions read as deferential without being meek. The horizontal emphasis of the new block, long and low, draws out the verticality of the historic neighbor rather than fighting it. It is the kind of contextual move that works precisely because it is so understated.

The Courtyard and Its Magnolia

Between the old and new structures, a planted courtyard anchored by a flowering magnolia tree serves as the social and spatial hinge of the project. The perforated brick wraps around to frame one side of this outdoor room, while glazed openings on the interior side pull the courtyard visually into the building. A terrazzo window sill catches dappled sunlight, confirming that the architects thought carefully about the specific quality of light at each threshold.

The courtyard does practical work too: it separates the two programs, buffers noise from the square, and provides cross-ventilation potential. But its real contribution is atmospheric. A magnolia in spring bloom, framed by brick and concrete, turns an ordinary passage between buildings into a moment worth pausing for.

Timber Lattice: The Garden Facade

The rear elevation trades brick for a timber lattice screen with a striking triangular bracing pattern. Photographed at dusk, the lattice glows warmly from the lit interior behind it, revealing how openly it admits daylight during the day and how it transforms the building into a lantern at night. The diagonal geometry is more assertive than the quiet perforations of the street facade, as if the architects allowed themselves more formal freedom on the side facing the private garden beds.

Inside, the lattice casts geometric shadow patterns across the terrazzo floor, creating a working environment that changes character hour by hour. It is a straightforward device, wood slats over glass, but the proportions and angle of the bracing elevate it into something genuinely atmospheric.

Interior Logic: Concrete, Plywood, and Light

The interior material palette is restrained but tactile. A double-height concrete stairwell serves as the vertical spine, topped by a circular skylight that drops a column of light down past suspended black pendant fixtures. The raw concrete finish is left honest, its formwork texture visible, giving the stair a monastic quality that contrasts with the warmth of the offices it connects to.

Upstairs, the office spaces trade concrete for exposed timber ceiling joists, light wood desks, and hexagonal wall panels that likely serve an acoustic function. Downstairs, plywood shelving and stainless steel base cabinets reflected in a glass partition suggest a program that mixes archival storage with working space. The palette is consistent without being uniform: each room has a slightly different material emphasis, calibrated to its use.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan reveals the two structures sitting within a carefully contoured landscape, oriented to preserve the courtyard gap between them. Interior partitions in the new volume are minimal, favoring open office configurations with a few enclosed rooms along the service core. The upper floor plan shows terraces carved out of the building mass, oriented toward the sloping terrain at the rear of the site. The roof plan confirms the contrast between the pyramidal roof of the historic turret and the flat roof of the addition, two geometries coexisting without pretending to be the same.

Why This Project Matters

De Zwarte Fles is not a landmark building and does not try to be one. Its significance lies in how precisely Vi.architectuur.atelier calibrated a small office addition to its context: deferential on the street, expressive in the garden, materially honest throughout. The dual-skin strategy, brick toward the public and timber toward the private, is a simple organizational idea executed with enough conviction to generate real spatial richness.

In a moment when office buildings in historic European settings tend to either mimic their neighbors or aggressively contrast them, this project demonstrates a third option. It listens to the existing fabric, then answers in a different register. The result is a building that strengthens the village square without shouting, and that makes a compelling case for architecture practices investing in the specificity of place.

Zwarte Fles Residence (De Zwarte Fles) by Vi.architectuur.atelier. Gent (Zwijnaarde), Belgium. 480 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Michiel Vergauwe, Annick Vernimmen, Stéphanie Mathias, Glenn Vanderbeke, and Koen Van Damme.

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