Appointment of designer: Renovation and repurposing of the Villa Vande Walle

The repurposing of Villa Vande Walle is an important first step in the development of the De Spil arts site. Following the realization of the new academy for part-time art education, a unique cultural campus is being created where education, creation, presentation and encounters reinforce each other. Within this broader context, with De Spil, the Heilig-Hartkerk, the city park and the new academy as important anchor points, the Villa takes on a new social and cultural significance. The City of Roeselare wants to develop Villa Vande Walle into a shared cultural workplace for the City of Roeselare, Academieplus and De Spil. The Villa will be a complementary place within the arts site: not a classic cultural building, but a flexible work and development environment where artists, students, cultural professionals and the public meet. The Villa will have a clear focus on art education, artistic development, creation, residency, presentation and experiment. It offers space for professional artists as well as young makers and students to research, create and show their work. The building will once again become a lively place where heritage and contemporary culture meet and where creativity, collaboration and knowledge sharing are central. The Villa Vande Walle will become a sustainable building. Maximum efforts will therefore be made to limit energy consumption and use sustainable energy sources. The concrete design assignment for this new cultural hotspot includes the following aspects: - Repurposing the Villa Vande Walle into a shared cultural workplace of the City of Roeselare, Academieplus (the unified art academy for performing and visual arts) and the De Spil culture house. This includes developing a future-oriented vision for the site as a coherent whole of culture, education and encounters, with attention to its role and embedding in the broader environment. - A building physics and one