The City of Ghent wants to centralise its logistics activities. This upheaval requires a thoughtful approach that takes into account today’s needs while providing sufficient resilience to accommodate growth and shrinkage demands, to allow for new infill and to support an evolving site identity.

Rather than a design proposal, we offer a design strategy. Plan-making is often steeped in creating permanent structures, conceiving and implementing a particular final image. As a result designs lose flexibility. Moreover, the ultimate users are assigned a role as mere consumers of the place, whereas they should actually be the producers, those who give direction to the place. We therefore choose to make the permanence as resilient as possible to create space within which the place can continue to reinvent itself and respond to coming changes and current challenges.

We explore the sustainability of the spatial structure. Sustainability is defined as robustness, adaptability and timelessness. The result is a project that allows flexibility in the future, both during the design process and after realisation, and this at the scale of the context, of the building and of the architectural element.