Inside an unoccupied industrial building close to Charleroi train station, new working spaces for high-tech companies and start-ups have laid out according to a city grid.

The central space, an indoor tropical garden, offers a different kind of community and leisure space, thus encouraging new forms of work and collaboration.

It generates sub-spaces which can be appropriated by users for lunch, a meeting, a game or a phone call. Thus, spaces for unproductive activities take up a central position in the overall layout of the workspace.

For Traumnovelle, though unproductive, these spaces are expected to yield favourable outputs in terms of motivation, team engagement and creativity.

A6K explores ways of generating opportunities for collaborations through shared programmes such as leisure areas, a cafeteria, a shared terrace, collective work and meeting spaces as well as a prototyping lab and fab-lab.

According to the authors, joining work spaces and learning spaces creates opportunities for bridges between different moments.

The project is entirely removable in case the industrial space needs to be converted or demolished. Each element has been considered in terms of re-use and short construction phase: 4 months.

The work modules are composed of industrial storage platforms. The facilities can be easily accessed. All partition materials can be detached and re-used. The biosourced cork flooring system and the glass panels can be disassembled and reassembled. 

The Advanced Engineering Centre acts as a laboratory to experiment the new forms of work of the 21st century, faced with the transformation of the labour market.