The transformation of the old military hospital of Antwerp into a residential neighborhood pointedly offers an immersion into a vegetated landscape at the heart of the city center.  This endeavor contrasts with the bareness of many urban and peri-urban situations that are often intentionally designed, yet with disregard to the human scale.  

In its entirety, the neighborhood is considered as a kind of open garden, traversed by public paths, with a public park for use by residents, within and around which the old buildings are immersed. The inhabitants come to appropriate the landscape as their own through a progression of typologies. A certain number of interior courtyards are re-divided up into individual gardens, a certain number of squares are redesigned for public use. Other courtyards are reserved for groups of collective ownership, while certain areas of the park are available to all.

It is not merely the creation of an undifferentiated “green space”, modeled on similar spaces found in large complexes, but rather a veritable interweaving of gardens, courtyards, promenades, and parks, capable of bringing about the successful appropriation and management of this atypical new neighborhood. Here one can walk among orchards, meadows, and prairies; all components are familiar, and their design elementary. What makes the project extraordinary is its placement within the Antwerp metropolis.