13 / 16Adaptive reuseBoom, Belgium
The studio's first building: a ring kiln brickworks turned into craft workshops, its chimney kept as a landmark. · Built
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Facts
Boom Kiln Workshops was the studio's first building. We started on it in 2009, the year the practice was founded, for Gemeente Boom, which had taken over a disused brickworks on the bank of the Rupel. The municipality wanted the site to be useful again, as a place where things are made, rather than a museum of itself. The project is 2 900 m² on a site of 8 300 m².
The brickworks is built around a ring kiln: a long brick structure of vaulted firing chambers arranged in a loop, fired continuously while the bricks moved through it. The brick was made from local clay and laid in 1897, in Flemish bond. Arkiv Heritage helped us record every chamber before work began, and most of what we did there was repair: new lime mortar, new roof coverings, and a floor that drains.
The firing chambers are now kilns again, for ceramics. Potters rent them by the week. Daylight reaches the vaults through the old fuel holes in the crown, and each chamber is a small, warm workroom.
Beside the kiln we built three new workshops in concrete and steel, for woodwork, metal and glass. They are plain sheds, set parallel to the kiln and no taller than it. Where our concrete meets the 1897 brick we let each material be what it is, and made no attempt to match one to the other. The workshops are let to makers on long leases, and the yard between them is shared.
Arcwright Structures designed the steel roofs to span the full width of each workshop, so the floors are clear for benches and machines. Section A–A (S-301) cuts through the kiln and one of the workshops, and the south elevation (E-401) shows the kiln, the three workshops and the chimney as a single row.
It was our first client and our first chimney. Most of what we still believe about old buildings, we learned on this site.
The chimney is 42 m tall and leans 30 cm. We stabilised its base, repaired the top courses and left the lean. Arcwright Structures monitored it for a year before and after the works, and it has not moved since. From the Rupel dyke it is still the landmark it was when the works were firing.
The workshops opened in 2012. The kiln has been busy since, and some of the potters who took the first chambers are still there, firing in the same vaults. We would detail some things differently now, the gutters especially, but we would make the same decisions.
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Ground floor plan of Boom Kiln Workshops at 1:200. Walls in solid black (400 mm concrete), openings as breaks with glazing lines, structural grid lettered and numbered; spaces: firing chambers, workshop.
Drawing set · 3 sheets
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