The adaptive re-use of the Brussels World Trade Center(WTC) exceeds the scale of a building transformation. It is the first large-scale project dealing with the late modernist heritage of the Northern Quarter and the first step toward giving the neighborhood a new lease on life. An acknowledgment of the value of what is there, keeping in mind the trauma it caused by wiping out a whole part of the city to make way for a ‘new’ Brussels in the 1970s. The wave of protest triggered by the brutal reshaping operated some decades ago still resonates today. This made it necessary to approach the transformation of the towers with caution, learning from the lessons of the past.

Befimmo, the owners of the tower and developers of the new project, decided not to leave everything behind and look forward in the usual way, but to look differently. A conscious way of dealing with a complex urban situation and its troubled past, and a shift in posture that takes into account the urban beyond the architectural, in a collective way, by building a conversation with their competitors, the municipality, the architects, urban planners, and a growing group of users and citizens.

This publication is structured in five sections, each recounting one aspect which led to the adaptive reuse of the World Trade Center. Only by engaging with all of these aspects, rather than singling out just one, has it been possible to engage with the symbolic weight of the site.

Befimmo, the owners of the tower and developers of the new project, decided not to leave everything behind and look forward in the usual way, but to look differently. A conscious way of dealing with a complex urban situation and its troubled past, and a shift in posture that takes into account the urban beyond the architectural, in a collective way, by building a conversation with their competitors, the municipality, the architects, urban planners, and a growing group of users and citizens.