African Design Magazine September 2015 | Page 49

International project Bibliotheek Zoersel Zoersel is a Belgian town surrounded and infiltrated by a busy highway and transit road. Among the terraced houses is the library, an urban intervention for public space aiming to encompass and symbolize all the public needs required by a town in one. Blending in and standing out, the library is built in brick and its scale refers to that of neighboring buildings. It is distinguished by a dancing roof structure and its black glistening brick facade. T he rehabilitation of the site ‘Pleintje’ in Zoersel, where the new library was built, made part of a broader public competition with the aim of revitalizing the entire central area of the town. Standing as a symbol of the town’s ambitions for the entire development, the first