Concertgebouw Bruges

Bruges is a medieval town that has spent a century being careful, and the concert hall Robbrecht en Daem built on 't Zand for the Capital of Culture year is not careful. It is a single dense mass with almost no windows, standing free on the square and holding a tall separate lantern of glass beside it, and its whole surface is covered in small red terracotta tiles from Saint-Omer — the colour of the town's roofs, applied to a wall, at the wrong scale and therefore visibly foreign. Inside, the sobriety continues: bare surfaces, a shallow palette, acoustics carefully engineered rather than decorated. The building divides the city, which was the point; Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem set it against the skyline rather than into it. It is the clearest public statement of the Flemish Nieuwe Eenvoud, and the tower is climbed for the view.