Adélie Boileau, Louise Daniel, Ararat Ghambaryan & Fabienne Groß
If you are a student here, you most likely arrive by train. Once stepping out of the station, you walk down the stairs, cross the street, and continue directly towards the Maison du Savoir, often without looking left or right. From the station to the building and back, we pass through without really dwelling. Everyone else is also just walking and walking, often with the wind literally pushing you into the building. This is the route we mainly focused on; we called it “the transit route”. Belval can be understood as a transit space, a space organised for functioning rather than for staying.
Yet if we slow down for a moment and pay attention, different aspects of this transit space begin to appear. On an autumn morning in Belval, if you close your eyes and listen carefully, one sound appears regularly. More than construction noise, you will hear a leaf blower. As nature cycles, and with the few trees present on site, a leaf falls. It lands quietly on the pavement stretching across the campus. For a short moment it rests there, moving slightly in the wind. Soon it disappears. The leaf blower arrives. A maintenance team sweeps it away together with the other leaves that have fallen. This is nothing extraordinary, yet it intrigued us enough to make us look more closely at how the place is maintained and how everyday processes are organised.
We also asked how other people experience Belval. Many shared a similar perception: “Belval feels like a simulation.” “It doesn’t feel real.” “Something is off.” These statements appeared repeatedly in conversations. What these observations seem to point to is a sense of artificiality and enclosure. Less a university campus than a business-like redevelopment project, Belval feels like a closed world. This impression stems not only from its physical separation from Esch-sur-Alzette, but also from the way everyday life unfolds within it. People mainly come to study or work and then leave again, while even the student residences on campus serve primarily as places to sleep rather than as places to live. This sense of enclosure also becomes visible in climatic terms. The area can be described as an urban heat island, while its wide streets and tall buildings often generate strong wind tunnels. How, then, do you open a closed world?
What gives our project its name is the idea of the “Weather-World,” described by anthropologist Tim Ingold. He argues that modern thought confines humans to the surface of the earth, treating the atmosphere as a separate container. In contrast, the “Weather-World” describes an open and continuous domain where beings live within the currents of wind, light and moisture, within the fluxes that bind earth and sky. He distinguishes between “exhabitants,” who live on the surface of the world, and “inhabitants,” who dwell within it. To dwell, he writes, is not to stand on the earth but to live “in the open.”
We understood this as follows: if worlding is the act of making worlds perceptible, then worlding airs means learning to dwell through air. This means rejecting the idea of personal bubbles and domes, and overcoming the separation between inside and outside, nature and culture. In Belval, this raises the question of to what extent its redevelopment reinforces such distancing.
As architects, the question then became how to represent these relations. Traditional maps divide space into fixed zones and grids. But if the world is open and constantly changing, this approach is limited. We therefore needed to reconsider our mapping tools. Instead of mapping objects, we began mapping movements, interactions and atmospheric conditions. We called these “Weather-World Maps.”
Our map (page 24-25) focuses on what is less visible in Belval. Its underlying systems, political decisions, historical transformations, and changing relations between land, environment and society. Initially, Belval functioned as a communal forest structured around a natural water source. The landscape operated as a shared ecosystem shaped by local practices. This changed with the sale of the forest and the onset of industrial production. Mining and steelmaking introduced an extractive economic model. Emissions entered the air, pollutants accumulated in the soil, and ownership structures extended beyond the region. After industrial decline, the site entered a wasteland phase. During this period, ecological processes partially re-established themselves. Vegetation returned and spontaneous ecosystems emerged. This phase showed that ecological systems can recover when pressure is reduced.
The current configuration is defined by large-scale redevelopment and the creation of a knowledge-based district. Innovation and research are positioned as the main drivers of transformation. Once again, relations between land, environment and society were reorganised, this time through planning, infrastructure and new economic priorities. What becomes visible through this reading of the map is a sequence of changing systems. The environmental, spatial and atmospheric conditions we observe today are the combined result of how these systems have been organised over time.
We cannot return to the ecosystem of the forest that once existed here, and we are now also part of the system that has been created. We know that Belval is still a young district and its long-term character is still emerging. It is still somewhat ironic that a place dedicated to innovation seems to leave little room for spatial appropriation and experimentation. In other words, the place leaves few opportunities for people, especially students, to adapt or use them in their own ways, while many ground-floor spaces remain empty.
Belval does not exist in isolation. Air, wind, weather and vegetation are not separate from the city. They influence how we move, where we stay, and how we experience places like Belval. The urban heat island effect makes these relationships tangible. The “Stadtklima-Analyse” for the Pro-Sud region identifies Les Terrasses des Hauts-Fourneaux as an area with a “risk of developing a new thermal stress hotspot” and recommends bioclimatic improvements and climate-sensitive planning.
Inspired by the Situationist slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage,” we removed a brick from Belval. It was a symbolic gesture to suggest that beneath these engineered surfaces, there is still room for change. Perhaps even a small intervention like this is enough to momentarily open the space and allow other worlds to appear. For this reason, Belval is not a closed case, and it should remain open.
