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In Brussels, Robbrecht en Daem Architecten extends Xavier Hufkens Gallery by re-opening a mansion they converted in 1992, adding a cascading concrete structure that shares floor levels with the original.
Few practices are offered the chance to return to their own work. In 1992, the Ghent-based studio converted a nineteenth-century Brussels mansion into a gallery for Xavier Hufkens. Three decades later, they were asked to extend it. The result is less renovation than resumption: an addition that picks up a conversation paused for thirty years.
The new building rises beside the original maison de maître as a monolithic stack of concrete volumes, each floor stepping back from the one below. This cascade-like massing creates setbacks at every level, and those setbacks become zenithal openings that pull light down into the galleries from above. Each room receives its own particular sky, its own quality of daylight, rather than the uniform wash of a standard white cube.
Surfaces hold the evidence of construction. Fair-faced concrete walls carry the grid of tie holes and the faint grain of formwork. Corrugated aluminum ceilings ripple overhead, punctuated by perforated ventilation grilles. Floors shift from polished concrete in the new galleries to oak in the mansion's rooms, marking the threshold between eras. Belgian cobblestones line the courtyard where a curved glass balustrade guards an external stair draped in trailing vines.
The two buildings share floor levels, so a continuous promenade runs through both. Movement alternates between museum-scale halls suited to monumental paintings and sculptures, and the domestic proportions of the original house, where smaller works find their scale. The studio describes this as a Pleiades of different spaces, a constellation calibrated to the multiplicity of how art manifests itself.
To extend a building is common. To extend one's own building, across a thirty-year gap, is something else. The project becomes a test of consistency and change: how much a practice has evolved, how much remains. The new structure stands as a monolithic figure against the decorated mansion, distinct but aligned, speaking a different language on the same floor datum.
