The Marie Janson plain completes a sequence of large open and shared public spaces that descend the Saint-Gillois slope. It is the pivotal place between series of parks making up the soft link and the Parvis area, a place symbolic of the town’s dynamism. Its transformation is an opportunity to experiment with a shared space that affirms the capacity of a city to set up ecological and urban structures. This new space is an opportunity to deal with the fundamental transitional issues facing the city today. Water management, treatment of polluted soils, change in mobility, reuse of materials, and the long term are the points that the project wants to make manifest. More than the choice of a zeitgeist or an aesthetic, the future plain confronts the existing and works with the conviction that the resources of the project are already present in the city itself.
The project proposes to work with what already exists, enhancing and recycling the elements present on the site, such as the location of its sports field, its large paved floor and its canopy of trees. It is designed as a park for a century, as a large grid of trees that will evolve over the years. Its ground is a large sloping plane, a gradient passing from mineral to vegetable, from intensity to quietness. It allows water to seep in and makes it visible through a wet landscape of wadis. By rationalising the space left for the car, the plain offers a space available for its inhabitants, alive and rich of activities, passages and festivals. The soil gradient expressly lends itself to a diversity of uses, allowing some to sit on the grass in the shade of a lime tree and others to ride their bikes or run in the fountains in the sun.
brussels architecture prize 2025 winner, public space category
photographs : © Michiel Decleene