Le Plateau du Maelbeek

Team Point of View

This proposal seeks to transform the park into a natural water reserve with a temporal approach. The first intervention stays strictly within the confines of the Europan brief, and a second more global approach was also studied for the totality of the park in the future. After analysis, it is believed that water will play a fundamental role in the wellbeing of the site and its surroundings – and the future intense precipitations brought on by climate change will be problematic for the Maelbeek valley just underneath the park. The park is transformed into a large natural water retention basin – all the while bringing biodiversity to the site and letting nature grow freely. The scale of the proposal is what gave it its name – the geological nature of the site.

Jury Point of View

The project’s strong vision is to make use of the existing infrastructure, mainly underground, to deal with water retention basins, at different scales, according to their position within and beyond the intervention site. It challenges our responsibility to deal with heavy rainwater issues, not only on the site, but also on in the broader context of the city. On the site itself, the project suggests a landscape organisation overlaying the existing structure of the Park, and ongoing experimentations on wild and educated nature. The light interventions will have a strong impact in changing the status of this site. From an artificial infrastructure designed 150 years ago as an event space, this site will become a real natural space improving life of its close and further environment, through the porosity of its boundaries.