The Royal Museum of Fine Arts is part of the 19th Century expansion of Antwerp’s city center. The first design of the building was embedding high ceilings and wide spaces, but during the following century the museum has undergone many uncoordinated changes: courtyards were covered, windows were closed, new walls added and the evident logic of routing was disrupted.
The new project aims to revert this condition via three main functional areas: a public block; the museum and its depot; staff and guests rooms. The extension will restore the original routing and integrate the exhibition space with its six courtyards to generate a new “vertical museum”. It will be based on floor-to-ceiling voids, staircases and elevators for different connections, and double walls for a new independent routing experience.
The interiors have a succession of colors, from the gray-yellow layer of the through the golden-brown (of the) characteristic colour of the Rubens and van Dyck rooms and all the way to the old Pompeian red of the staircase.