The images show construction of the £107 million scheme, which converts the 1930s Brussels Art Deco Citroën garage and former car factory into a ‘cultural city’.
The 40,000m2 multipurpose museum, gallery and atelier workspace will be Brussels’ first museum of modern art and architecture, and will include performance auditoriums, workshops, community spaces and retail.
All five floors of gallery spaces in Kanal have been finished along with the main superstructure – including the roof – between the buildings. Still to come is the fit-out between the existing cross axis of 18m-wide streets – one 100m and one 50m-long – that cut through the former factory and showroom complex.
Plans for Kanal – Centre Pompidou were submitted in 2019 by Sergison Bates in collaboration with Swiss practice EM2N and Belgian outfit noAarchitecten. Drawings have also been released by the trio of practices.
The three practices, which set up an international consortium under the name Atelier Kanal, won the job in a high-profile contest the year before, seeing off an impressive shortlist of firms, including Caruso St John, 6a, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and OMA.
Kanal has announced its opening programme in collaboration with Centre Pompidou – officially opening to the public on 28 November 2026, delayed from an original opening date in 2023.
The opening exhibition, A truly immense journey, will feature more than 350 works from the Pompidou, the Kanal collection and both Belgian and international public and private collections.
In addition, the Turner Prize-winning British collective Assemble is creating a free-to-visit 700m2 indoor playground in the form of an imaginary landscape of hills, volcanoes and distant planets.
Kanal – Centre Pompidou is being delivered in partnership with the Kanal Foundation and the famous Paris-based Centre Pompidou, together with the Development Corporation of the Brussels-Capital Region.
While the scheme retains much of the garage’s existing fabric, it inserts three new volumes: a 11,300m2 museum of modern and contemporary art; Brussels’ architecture centre (formerly Centre International pour la Ville, l’Architecture et le Paysage); and the Rassembleur, a multifunctional space that can be used for performances, workshops or exhibitions.
The design team said it had honed its contest-winning proposals following a temporary exhibition, Kanal Brut, held within the garage in 2019. The show was a precursor to the wider overhaul, giving the public the chance to ‘discover this mythical building in its raw state’ before it closed in 2021.
The 425m-long former Citroën car factory, built between 1933 and 1934, sits alongside the Charleroi-Brussels Canal, close to Brussels’ city centre. Its iconic showroom façade, which is also being carefully restored, consists of a 24m-high glass and steel structure.
