Kanal — A Great Good Place

Kanal, a third place

The former Citroën car factory, built in 1933–34 and composed of an iconic showroom with a large factory space behind it, has been transformed into Kanal: a generous public interior dedicated to cultural production, bringing together visual arts and architecture, dance, drama, film and music. 

Kanal will be a meeting place for the diverse neighbourhood and the wider city of which it is part. We might call it a third place, a term formulated by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place to describe spaces where people spend time beyond home, the first place, and work or school, the second place. A third place is familiar, welcoming and available to people without requiring them to participate in a particular activity or to consume.

Kanal invites citizens, organisations, collectives and communities to appropriate and inhabit large parts of the building: for production, performances, events, informal gatherings or simply to spend time. The museum extends beyond curated art to become part of the city and its fabric. In this sense, 

Kanal departs from the traditional museum and instead offers a place of civic gathering responding to an increasing absence of shared public spaces in our cities today. Its streets, halls, workshops, libraries, terraces and galleries form a connected landscape where cultural and everyday life can overlap.

Kanal, trust in what is already there

Kanal is an exemplar of reuse. Our starting point has been the former Citroën factory as we found it: an existing structure with its own scale, character, traces and possibilities. Located alongside the canal and within walking distance of Brussels’ city centre, a building of this scale (100 × 200 metres) offers exceptional opportunities that would be difficult to achieve with a new building. Rather than a spectacular gesture, our proposal offers an attitude of Radical Optimism – open and non-prescriptive, spontaneous and instinctive – much like the spirit of modern progress in which it was created. In so doing we allow the original building to become once again a key protagonist in the city. 

The interior is a fine example of elegant industrial engineering, while the glass façades are a clear expression of early modernism. Our ambition has been to trust the building as we found it, to embrace its industrial character and its many layers of use. Some parts of the building are restored, some are repaired and upgraded, and some are selectively replaced where new structural, climatic or acoustic conditions are required. We are transforming it with a light touch and a deliberate economy of means, while adding new architectural elements that extend the existing building and create new and varied spaces within and between.

This attitude has led both the conceptual strategy and the detail. It has influenced our working methods, our choice of materials and our approach to energy, construction and collaboration.

Kanal, a horizontal “museum”

An existing cross-axis, formed by 18-metre-wide streets, cuts through the former factory and showroom complex. With entrances at each of their four ends, these streets connect the different activities of Kanal and reach out towards the city beyond.

Together with the piano nobile—a long, continuous collection of spaces at first-floor level—they cover nearly half of the total area of the building, offering unclaimed public space that institutions, artists and citizens can appropriate. Kanal is a horizontal public interior, offering multiple routes through its public domain, with niches and pockets in which to hang out, think, play, work or wander.

Oriented towards the city centre, the iconic former showroom, a 24-metre-high glass and steel structure and symbol of Citroën, acts as Kanal's public image. As a new Stage for Brussels the Showroom is restored and transformed to become the grand urban interior that it once was. Large sections of the ground floor façade can be opened to connect the interior with the newly refurbished Sainctelette Square. Most of the time unprogrammed, it is a covered public square that can accommodate installations, performances and concerts and on the upper floors houses a restaurant and a large freely accessible roof terrace with a bar and views over Brussels.

Kanal, three tailored houses

The existing car factory offers an exceptional public volume, with a scale and openness that define Kanal. Three new houses are inserted within it to introduce the more precise structural, climatic and acoustic conditions required by the museum programme.

One house accommodates the shared uses such as the auditorium and offices, another Kanal Architecture (formerly known as CIVA) and the third a new museum of modern and contemporary art. The five levels of the museum offer a column-free gallery space of 725 m2 per floor, each with different ceiling heights, allowing a range of scenographies, configurations and connections. A 7-metre-high basement gallery is also provided with separate access available directly from the outside so that it can be used as an underground venue in its own right. Some galleries allow direct connections to adjoining workshop spaces. Others are self-contained and can benefit from direct or indirect natural light with views of the canal and the city beyond. Kanal Architecture contains exhibition spaces on the ground floor, the very valuable archives on different floors with consultation centre and a silent library next to a study space and a bookshop.

Kanal, a seasonal organism

The environmental strategy begins with the decision to retain and reuse the existing building. The existing structure represents embodied energy, material resources, architectural memory and civic infrastructure. New interventions are introduced where they can extend the building’s life and improve its performance.

The vast industrial roof has been complemented by state-of-the-art insulation and a 4,000 m² solar array. The factory’s 425-metre-long glass and steel façade has been meticulously restored and optimised with vacuum glazing and opening windows that provide natural ventilation. The energy strategy, developed with Buro Happold and Bureau Greisch, establishes three climatic zones: a large public interior (54% of the area) offering seasonal comfort as an unprogrammed space flooded with daylight and fresh air, and two new exhibition houses (21% of the area) providing the precise climatic conditions required for the presentation and preservation of art. Connecting these extremes are intermediate glazed gallery spaces that act as thermal buffers, improving the energy efficiency across the entire building.

Kanal, shared authorship

With Kanal the conventions of the signature building by one celebrity architect have been challenged. Atelier Kanal is an architectural practice founded by three offices—EM2N, noAarchitecten and Sergison Bates architects—working together under one name. The architecture and interiors have been designed and delivered through shared authorship. Atelier Kanal has always been located in Brussels, working the first two years from within the Citroën factory itself in close collaboration with the client Kanal Foundation. 

This open-ended collaborative design process has continued with the design and development of the bespoke Kanal furniture system, compatible with the Open Structures dimension system and the paint colour concept, collaborating with artist Sarah Smolders. Atelier Kanal also invited Chevalier Masson to design special curtains, Jan Minne to create the inner mist garden and Cartlidge Levene to develop the wayfinding and signage. The building as a forum for ideas and shared ambitions has been extended by the commissioning of other designers to develop the interiors of the reading room and bookshop, the restaurant, the brasserie, the cultural market and a children’s playground. Kanal is therefore not the work of ‘one hand’ but, by definition, of ‘several hands’ guided by the combined vision of Atelier Kanal and the Kanal Foundation. This process of creation is explicitly meant to continue after the designers have left the stage. Kanal is an invitation for artists, curators, citizens, visitors and staff to continue to reprogram and rethink the building in response to the changing needs and future possibilities.

Kanal reveals how architecture can reinvent the museum typology, not only as a place for art, but as a stage for the city and its citizens. It is not the final state of the former Citroën factory, but its next condition: renewed without being erased, made precise without being overdetermined and open to continued transformation.

Kanal is an invitation for Brussels to inhabit, appropriate and imagine together.

A Great Good Place.
September 2026

Atelier Kanal: EM2N, Sergison Bates architects, noAarchitecten.
Partners: Stephen Bates, Mark Tuff (Sergison Bates architects), Daniel Niglli, Mathias Müller (EM2N), An Fonteyne, Jitse van den Berg, Philippe Viérin (noAa).