Liège with its post-industrial identity has a long history as an important manufacturing center in Europe for steel making and coal mining. However, the segregation between production and the city, has made the industry detached from the urban condition and the everyday life. Today, whilst new urban productive typologies were spotted in Liège that offered chances for hybrid and innovative making, manufacturing found its root to thrive in the city – and this is what we identified – a new industrial urbanism.

“A good city has industry.”

This design project argues that industry should be part of the city. It aims to develop a new factory type with the involvement of human scale and everyday life in the current urban setting to eliminate segregation between human and machines, and thus suggests a mixed-use program with a focus of work and production.

So, how can production be visible and fit into the city?

The design approach is to go hybrid, to combine production and consumption activities, and to have a closer loop from producers to consumers. The project hopes to achieve a productive co-existence of different functions within a building.

Today’s concerns are not only about how to design a factory building working efficiently as a machine, but also the social aspect of a factory, for example, the human factors which guide the spatial design for circulation and interactions for the workers, neighbors and commuters.

“Made in Liège”, the project is strategically located next to the Bressoux train station entrance area, at the intersection of the railway and a bridge, thereby forming an important urban transition between the industrial area of Droixhe and the neighborhood of Bressoux.

Having a long and linear shape in connection with an existing bridge, the building is almost like a train with many carriages, which you can enter separately, and they have their own identity but still be able to work together. In different carriages, it responds to different researched aspects (productive urbanism, working environment, social interactions) under the topic “Human & Machine”. When different cabinets come together, it becomes a mini city in one building.