Keramis

Keramis is an art-center dedicated to contemporary ceramics. It houses museological, pedagogical and production activities, as well as artist residencies. It will be part of the rehabilitation of the former Royal Boch faience factory in La Louvière and organizes itself around the classified buildings, housing the three bottle kilns.

The museum inserts itself boldly in the city center, bolstering this new urban fragment located in the middle of a potential future shopping complex. Considering the whole plot, the volume hollows itself and spreads in order to create distinct links with its context (square, park, buildings).

The new concrete wings enveloping the classified building create a dialogue between materials and spaces, curves and angles, smooth and rough, light and shadow. The angles roundup to create fluidity – the functions are settling. The building widens, to create an effect of porosity.

The museography uses a vocabulary borrowed from the factory, storage and domesticity and aims at associating the vision of objects with the memory of the site. All of the exhibition halls possess their own qualities. The scenography is generated by the architecture.