OMA has revealed its plans to renovate and extend three vacant railway buildings in Brussels to create an office for Belgium train operator SNCB.
The proposal will create workspaces for 4,000 employees of SNCB, otherwise known as the National Railway Company of Belgium, beside the Brussels-South train station.
Designed by OMA with Jaspers-Eyers to contrast with the existing brick buildings, the 11-storey extension will measure 236-metres in length.

"Contemporary Brussels is both historic and modern, national and European, regional and cosmopolitan. That is its essence ? in the mediation between presumed opposites. It is this reality that our project intends to express," said OMA partner Reinier de Graaf.
"It is borne out of the creative tension between an expectation for the future, and a respect for futures past," he continued. "It embraces the Belgian Brussels, with its early, and often courageous expressions of modern architecture, and the European Brussels, for which the European railway and the Brussels-South stand as symbols."

OMA and Jaspers-Eyers' proposal was the winning design in a competition for the headquarters, which was organised by SNCB. It is OMA's first large-scale project in Belgium.
The three existing buildings that will be overhauled as part of the project were built as an ensemble for the Brussels World's Fair (Expo 58) and have been empty for two decades.
They previously contained workspaces and a post office for the ...