Community House

The City of Roeselare aims to create a new place in Beveren where people of all ages can meet, relax, take part in activities and strengthen local social networks. Wijkhuis Beveren is conceived as a community centre that accommodates a diverse range of users, associations and organisations within one shared civic framework.

The project responds to a growing need for public places that extend everyday living into the semi-public realm. It is imagined as an open house: a social anchor where community life can unfold across indoor and outdoor spaces.

The programme is substantial for the available site. Rather than allowing the building footprint to dominate the plot, the proposal introduces one clear architectural idea: reduce the footprint through smart stacking and organise the programme as a flexible cluster within a wider landscape.

This approach preserves space for greenery, play and informal gathering, while improving permeability across the site. The building takes cues from the surrounding residential typologies, translating their scale into a collection of smaller “community centre houses” that read as one coherent whole. This reduces impact on adjacent homes and helps the project settle naturally into its context.

The design is structured around three principles: spatial freedom, exchangeability and smart stacking. Free floor fields allow rooms to be subdivided or reconfigured over time. Shared use is embedded in the organisation, enabling different users to occupy spaces at different moments and reducing the overall footprint.

Instead of a long linear scheme with extended circulation, the project clusters the programme around a compact central heart. This core combines reception, meeting, orientation and circulation in one legible space. From here, visual relations between functions are immediate, helping users understand the building intuitively. Large and small halls can be subdivided, allowing simultaneous use by different groups.

The project draws on Open Building principles: a robust and resilient structure combined with flexible and replaceable layers. The architecture is expressed as a group of connected house-like volumes, each with its own identity, yet linked through shared circulation and a common roofscape.

This structure supports adaptability, long-term use and future change. The separation between structure, services and infill makes maintenance easier and allows spaces to evolve without undermining the building’s overall clarity.

Outdoor space is treated as equal to the interior. A soft axis across the site, together with play zones and green areas, extends the neighbourhood landscape and supports a rich variety of use. The large and small halls can open parts of their glazed façades to the green field, effectively doubling the available social space in summer and making activities visible in the evening.

The positioning of the volumes creates an in-between landscape around a slow route between Izegemseaardeweg and Pastoriestraat. The building does not divide the site; it allows the landscape to flow through it.