In her design for an extension to Z33 Italian architect Francesca Torzo refers to the materials and colour of the surrounding buildings but at the same time alienates them. Instead of standard facing bricks, she used diamond-shaped brick tiles to clad the external walls of the new three-storey building. Only the splayed reveals to the windows and doors are rendered, tone-in-tone with the bricks, in a red-violet colour that is to be found hardly anywhere else in Hasselt.
Francesca Torzo emphasises that the brick rhomboids are not just a cladding, but form an integral part of the loadbearing wall. Around 35 000 pieces, each 37 mm thick and weighing around 1 kilo, are fixed to the twin leaf external walls built of reinforced bricks and concrete. One of these walls in particular has no equivalent in the inner city: the entrance facade to the museum, which is 60 metres long and 12 metres high, is almost entirely devoid of openings. It is interrupted by just two tall, narrow doorways, while a discrete bend at the middle helps us to grasp it visually. This is also where the only expansion joint needed for the powerful in situ concrete wall was placed.
It is somewhat easier to understand the radical way in which the building turns away from the street if one takes a look at the history of the site. In the 18th century the beguines, a lay religious order for women, settled in the triangular urban block and built one of their typical housing complexes consisting of low terrace houses around a church. These houses, too, have almost no windows to the street and instead open to the green internal courtyard of the block. In the 19th century a brandy distillery was built to the north-west, which today houses the National Jenever Museum. Parts of the beguinage, including the church, were destroyed in the Second World War. On its west side the main Z33 building, a brick structure designed by architect Gustaaf Daniëls was erected in 1958.
Many of the details of Francesca Torzo's design refer to the architecture of the older neighbouring building, for instance the staircase railings and the daylight ceilings above them, or also the way in which the building's rear facade is articulated. Tall, narrow slit windows alternate with openings that are the entire width and height of the space behind. The number of floors in the new extension - two exhibition storeys with a mezzanine between them for the offices and workspaces - matches Daniëls' wing. However, the sequences of spaces could hardly be more different: in Daniëls building the axially organised exhibition halls relate to each in terms of their proportions, whereas a tour of the exhibition spaces in the Torzo building is full of surprises and changes of scale.
The new main entrance to Z33 leads through a small courtyard with a tree and a fountain along the interface between the old and the new building. From here the route does not continue axially into the building but turns left around the corner. In the interior there are large and small spaces, halls that are entirely artificially lit and others that have views into the garden, spaces that extend through the three storeys of the building and others with a ceiling height of less than three metres. The connection between the rooms takes the form of open doorways whose reveals are splayed like the window reveals in the facade. In this way the architect succeeds in negating the thickness of the walls and reduces the transition between two rooms to a separating line between light and shadow.
In Z33 one looks in vain for expensive wall and ceiling claddings. The building costs of around eight million euros were remarkably low for a project of this size. The ventilation ducts run through a void in the floor, the ceilings and walls are plastered in white. The same applies to the diamond-shaped coffered ceilings in the exhibition rooms, which were created in the process of making the in situ concrete slabs. Their effect is not merely ornamental, they also have an acoustic function. Above and beyond this they provide a basic order for the layout of the lighting and the fire detectors, each of which is integrated in a recess in the middle of a ceiling bay.
