Thus the city within

A palatial building rests by Rue de Bois Sauvage of Brussels, an intimate street located at the exact point where the lower historic city ends and upper bureaucratic city starts. The Palace remains like a parasite of a larger introverted structure that fortifies an entire urban block to hide the offices of the National Bank of Belgium. The architectural brief for this graduation project requests the renovation of the headquarters concerning the vacancy of office space with the greater intention of opening up the National Bank as an institution. To the light of this brief, this architectural thesis departs from the premise that in order for the Bank to open up it must get engaged in the problems of its nearby reality, the problems of the city of Brussels. The in depth analysis of the history of urban transformation of the city of Brussels led by land speculation, revealed the problems of the Central European capital cities during the second half of the 19th century, which have been unavoidably inherited by the city of the 21st century. The process of urban gentrification of the historic town, firstly by pushing out the working classes to the periphery in favour of the wealthy bourgeois and secondly exploiting land value financially erasing any hint of residential life from the old city at the heart of Brussels’ Pentagon. The result of these consecutive processes of urban transformation can be read in space through the architectural typology of Brussels and have been explained in this research by means of the alley, the shopping arcade, the corner building and the blocks of Brusselization. Understanding them not only as architectural devices but also as urban figures has helped untangling the history of urban gentrification in Brussels which constructed through time a division between the rich bureaucratic upper eastern city and the working class neighbourhoods in lower western Brussels, articulated by a touristic uninhabited historic city where the National
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