From October 19, 2024 until March 16, 2025, the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum presents the exhibition ‘Soft Power – The Brussels Way of Making the City. An exhibition of S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in cooperation with the Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA) and with support of Brussels Capital Region.
The exhibition ‘Soft Power: The Brussels Way of Making the City’ traces Belgium’s journey to becoming an internationally renowned hotspot for contemporary architecture and urban planning.
Practical info
“Soft Power – The Brussels Way of Making the City”
October 1, 2024 – March 16, 2025
S AM Swiss Architecture Museum
Steinenberg 7, 4051 Basel
Switzerland
The show sheds light on the framework conditions that have given rise to a high-quality building culture in Brussels and encouraged a new generation of architects to participate in its urban development.
The Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA), which was founded in 2009, has made a significant
contribution to this, despite being an institution with a purely advisory function. Through it, the city architect and his team have developed a range of tools aimed at supporting clients throughout the entire project process, from its definition to its realization.
Competitions are the BMA’s most important instrument: they enable a transparent opening of the
markets for architecture, urban planning or public space and contribute to the quality of the projects and thus ultimately the city. The non-anonymized and internationally tendered ‘calls’ are conceived as a hybrid between open and invited competitions – a format to be considered more frequently in Switzerland?
BOUWMEESTER MAÎTRE ARCHITECTE (BMA)
In Belgium, the first ‘bouwmeester’ was appointed in Flanders in 1999, succeeded by Antwerp (2000), Brussels (2009), Charleroi (2013) and Ghent (2017). The scope of the Belgian ‘master architect’ is much broader than that of the historic Dutch ‘Rijksbouwmeester’, from which the designation derives. The Bouwmeester is not limited to supporting the government in its role as an exemplary client, but also promotes architectural culture through competitions, awards, and pilot projects.
In Brussels, Olivier Bastin was appointed first Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA) for a period of five years, during which time the development of new competition procedures began. Kristiaan Borret has retained this focus since assuming the position in January 2015. During his two mandates (January 2015 – December 2024), more than 400 ‘open calls’ have been held, which serve as the first phase of a competition. Based on their skills, experience and motivation, 3 to 5 applicants are then selected for the second phase, for which a more detailed design is to be developed.
5 TOPICS, 10 YEARS, 15 PROJECTS
If multipli-city is the imperative future of the European city, then Brussels is a model for embracing this complexity. But it is precisely the notion of not having a Leitkultur that is
now regarded as an interesting condition. A certain disharmony of the cityscape is perceived as
positive, as it ultimately also better reflects the diversity of the urban population. The BMA has maintained this philosophy in Brussels and supplemented it with a variety of architectures that have emerged from the competition system.
The main part of the exhibition features 15 projects that have consolidated the agenda of
Bouwmeester Maître Architecte, not least by requiring experimental procedures to be found and/or developed.They also reflect how Brussels is now able to focus less on being the political capital of Europe and again on being an inclusive home for its citizens.
