Built between 1902 and 1907, Tour & Taxis was in the 20th century a 40 ha storage complex at the luvial, road and railway gates of Brussels. Constituted of warehouses and sheds transformed to become more durable, the site is today a neighborhood in full mutation with the ambition to become an important vector of the economic and cultural development of Brussels. The objective is to transform into a multifunctional eco-neighborhood bordering the Canal de Bruxelles and organized around 3 axes: revitalized heritage, sustainable communities and water. This development is accompanied by the creation of a gateway for public transport and soft traffic that will link Rue Picard to the south of the site at the Gare du Nord.
PUBLICITÉ
The future Maritime Station will be divided into five parallel ships of iron, cast iron and glass. Currently empty, it has a floor area of 40,000 m² and is one of the largest railway stations in Europe. The concept of Vincent Callebaut Architectures is to bring the new public park and canal into the Maritime Station throughout the 280 m of its naves to create a real "biocampus". The two intermediate naves are thus composed of vegetal and aquatic flows. These interior gardens, tropical in the East and continental in the West, climb on the facades of the functional entities thus forming real cascades of exotic and endemic plants.
Area B facing the northern pediment of the Gare Maritime is dedicated to the construction of 85,000 m² of houses and shops. The concept, called "Vertical Forests", is to build "Sky-Villas", that is to say individual houses with private gardens and community orchards in the sky of Brussels. The project imagines large, elegantly curved roofs that form market gardens with stunning views towards the historic center of Brussels and the Basilica of Koekelberg. Tilted to the south, these roofs are lined with solar panels (12,500 m²) supplying in part the energy needed in the dwellings. To the south, the height of the towers does not exceed 24 meters in order to align with the ridges of the three great naves of the Maritime Station. To the north, along the future Avenue Tour & Taxis, they reach 100 m in height over more than 30 floors with panoramic views towards Molenbeek, Laeken and the Atomium in the distance.
