OAI Architectour 2022

23 Articles of the Lycée Michel Rodange secondary school is another demonstration of respect for historic buildings. The school’s new sports hall was designed in perfect synergy with the brutalist architecture of 1971 while at the same time enhancing its geometry using far fewer building materials. The housing project executed in the Grund district on behalf of the Fonds du Logement (‘Housing Fund’), meanwhile, aimed to create affordable housing within an internation- ally (UNESCO), nationally and communally listed fabric. Shapes, volumes and materials, colour codes and even functions had to comply with all of these heritage-related requirements while at the same time demonstrating an element of creativity and innovation. Enhancing the heritage of sites of outstanding universal value does not require historical sites to be fossilised or museumised, but it does require quality of life to be developed in harmony with the historical urban landscape. The housing project in the Grund district has been held up as a model initiative at the UNESCO Visitor Centre. In most cases, interventions of this kind are evidence of a fruitful collaboration with the Institut national pour le patrimoine architectural (‘National Institute for Architectural Heritage’). The Luxembourg Learning Centre in Esch-Belval, which saw the former raw material storage hall for the blast furnace converted into a university learning centre, is one of the most avant-garde projects built at the foot of the two blast furnaces, which are listed as national monu- ments. When it came to designing the facade, the architects were inspired by the patterns left on the windows of the former steelworks by particle deposits from its former steel production days.