The conversion of the former Citroën garage in Brussels into KANAL – Centre Pompidou ranks among FINEO by AGC’s largest projects: around 2,280 vacuum glazing units across nearly 3,900 square metres of façade. The challenge was to preserve the historic steel façades while significantly improving energy efficiency, acoustics and user comfort.
Built in the early 1930s as Europe’s largest garage, the complex is a landmark of modernist industrial architecture, with its 25-metre-high glazed Showroom facing the city and several Workshop halls behind it. In 2017, Atelier KANAL architects, a consortium of noAarchitecten, EM2N and Sergison Bates architects, won the competition with a design that takes the existing fabric as the starting point.
The historic Workshop façades placed tight constraints on the glazing. Their welded L and T-profiles were designed for single glazing, with rebate depths of 4 and 5.5 centimetres, while decades of deformation had left hardly any pane field rectangular. Coated single glazing could not meet comfort and acoustic requirements, so conventional insulating glass did not fit.
FINEO 10 with low-iron Clearvision glass provided the solution. At 9.7 millimetres thick, it achieves a Ug value of 0.8 W/(m²K). With no comparable reference project at this scale, thermal and dynamic simulations assessed condensation risk in the thermally non-broken steel profiles. A project-specific fixing system was developed and tested at Ghent University.
“We wanted to preserve the slender steel profiles, retain the exceptional transparency of the historic façade, and at the same time significantly improve energy performance,” said project architect Arabella El Ginawy.
Around 1,400 panes across some 2,200 square metres went into the historic Workshop façades. Decades of deformation meant that almost every pane field was unique, yet not a single pane had to be re-manufactured because of incorrect dimensions.
The showroom required a different solution: reconstructed from archive photographs, it received some 530 units with the thermally broken Janisol Arte 66 steel profile system.
Both solutions follow the same principle: retain and upgrade as much existing fabric as possible. According to Gevelinzicht Ingenieur-Architecten, reusing the workshop façades alone avoided around 61,000 kilograms of CO2 equivalent. A new curtain wall façade would have been easier and in some respects more economical, but would have drastically altered the building’s architectural integrity.