TEN and Babini Geysen win the International Competition to Design the new Recycling Centre in Jette, Brussels. Utilizing 100% Recycled Materials.
The title “Nobody Leaves the Party” reflects the design ambition behind the new Recycling centre for Jette, Brussels. The project strives to maximise the reuse of the existing buildings, components, and materials currently occupying the site by incorporating various degrees of circularity. The intervention addresses the urgent challenges facing contemporary construction practices—namely, the increasing scarcity of raw materials and the impact of the carbon-intensive construction sector on the environment and society.
Rather than contributing to waste, Nobody Leaves the Party frames scarcity as an opportunity and presents a new model for designing circular economies. In doing so, it showcases the architectural potential of recycling while promoting awareness of material culture and its vital role in the built environment.
Waste as a Design Error:
Waste is redefined as a failure to creatively revalue existing materials and spatial resources. By embracing the site’s inherited structures and materials, the design transforms their latent potential into new circular economies.
The Architect as Estimator:
The architect's role shifts to evaluating and repurposing existing resources. Through on-site renovation, material repurposing, and upcycling, creativity is reframed as a transformative process of value creation.
Donnery of Thinking:
Recypark integrates a central public donnery—a space for donation, creative reuse, and knowledge exchange as a social act. Accessible and highly visible, it aims to reshape public behavior around waste, value, and material culture.
A New Aesthetic of Reuse:
Leveraging AI-trained models based on site components and materials, the design of the recycling shed emerges as a structural and visual experiment in reappropriation. Its cohesive and generous form establishes a new civic building typology.
Circular Ecology:
Embedded within the site’s topography, Recypark extends circularity to include landscape materials, soil regeneration, and maintenance strategies, setting a precedent for adaptive and regenerative urban infrastructure.
Location: Jette, Brussels, Belgium
Client: Bruxelles Propreté/ Net Brussel
Competition supervised by the BMA Bouwmeester Maitre Architecte Brussels
Project Team: Fabian Lauener, Joel Zimmerli, Scott Lloyd, + Babini Geysen: Alice Babini, Raf Geysen
Design Research and Visualisation: Olivier Campagne
Research: Tiphaine Abenia
Engineering: Ney & Partners/WOW
Landscape design: Taktyk
Graphic design: Julie Peeters
Special techniques: Pluricite
EPB-advisor: iVEC
Expert soil pollution: ABV environment
Safety coordination: Securisan