ABC huis

ABC HOUSE BRUSSELS

‘A school for life.’

Since 2008, the continuous operation of ABC has been housed in a 1600m2 renovated industrial laundry on two levels near the North Station in Brussels. The ABC-house is an open and dynamic research centre focused on arts, culture and education, accessible to people of all ages. School classes, families, teachers in training, supervisors of youth workshops, collaborators of museums/libraries,… anyone committed to arts education and cultural mediation is welcome!
The house is conceived as an interactive and artistic laboratory for play, work, research, discovery and expression. It includes a variety of workshops (textile, wood, paper and book making), a film auditorium, a crèche-café, an architecture studio, a child-sized kitchen, outdoor play areas and a vegetable garden.

Since april 2016 ABC has build an extension to the existing building: it contains a laboratory-classroom and a quiet room for meditation, movement and body awareness.

The arrangement, with all furniture fully designed in-house, exudes a soothing minimalism, a deliberate choice, on one hand not to over excite and on the other hand, to make visitors sensitive to an aesthetic feeling. At the same time, the modular wooden furniture is arranged and configured so that it invites visitors to explore independently.

After years of wandering and settling temporarily in various institutions, ABC procured an old building available in the crumple zone between the Brussels Manhattan District and the Schaerbeek district. …if the architecture or the appearance of the ABC house teaches one thing, it is how a space for children, how education and holistic learning, need freedom of thought, freedom of concepts and the freedom to construct, from a dilapidated building, a school for life.
(Koen Van Synghel, Architecture yearbook Flanders 2010)