The landscape of Sclessin testifies of the important role of the industrial furrow in the development of Liège and of Belgium. The Man’s imprint left monumental architectures on those landscapes and today, it is essential to reconsider those mutilated landscapes and to reinstate them coherently in a city that keeps growing, but also to think again about the relationship between Man and the environment that he builds for himself, that he transforms and that he then gives up, and to reconcile the landscape and the city’s evolution to insure her sustainability.
The speed of evolution of the contemporary society stressed the contrast between those industrial landscapes and the needs of the contemporary city. The creation of a training school, whose modernity and orientation towards new technologies, would allow to revitalize this district while trying to establish links between these two periods.
The school, which is implanted between the coal tip and the industries, the obvious signs of the character of this district, tries to reconcile this artefact made out of nature and industrial architecture.
The morphology of the main building mimics the linearity and rigor of the industries which face it and the various workshops are characterized by particular atmospheres depending upon the relation between buildings, lights, contrasts and natures which vary according to the functions of studios and synergies which can establish between them.
The contrasts between the west facade, of which the rational character answers to the rigor of manufactures, and the east facade, which interferes in the coal tip reinterpreting its curves to recreate a link between the man and this abandoned landscape, is a kind of echo to the rigor and precision of this industrial architecture and the wilder and dissident side of the nature.