De Baes Associates and architect Sophie van Noten's House SSK is a steel and glass house wrapped inside an open-topped brick shell in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Smuggling in contemporary design like an architectural Trojan Horse, House SSK's unusual design is a response to the restrictions of building a new home within an older urban fabric.
Photo by Filip Dujardin
Brussels-based De Baes Associates collaborated with Sophie van Noten of VBVN to design the unusual house.
"The house disengages from its context but is at the same time imprisoned within it," the architects said.
According to the architects the empty window and door openings that lead to a small, interstitial courtyard space "allows the city to become part of the house, or vice versa".
House SSK sits in an old working-class area of Kortijk, with streets of typical low brick and render houses forming the backdrop within which the new house needed to conform.
Its outer brick shell takes its door and window arrangement from these neighbouring buildings, stepping its more contemporary facade back from the street.

The home itself, within the glass box, is arranged across three levels with a central stair, surrounded by a volume where the majority of the building's services are located.

At ground level, this central volume houses a bathroom and storage, separating a reception room at the front from a bedroom at the rear.
On the first storey the whole floor plate is opened up into a living and dining sp...