Campus Deleers Reframes the Brussels School as Urban Production

SMAK Architects’ Anderlecht campus layers education, childcare, sport and small-scale industry on a former industrial site.

Campus Deleers / SMAK Architects — Image: Philippe van Gelooven. Source: ArchDaily.

Campus Deleers, designed by SMAK Architects in Anderlecht, Brussels, brings education and urban production into a single 26,000-square-metre mixed-use development. Presented by ArchDaily, the project combines a primary school, technical secondary school, childcare, adult education, sports facilities and units for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Its central architectural proposition is direct: productive spaces occupy the lower portion of the campus, while educational functions are stacked above. The arrangement turns a former industrial site into a dense civic district, while preserving room for work, learning, movement and public use within one legible structure. The result is less a conventional school building than a piece of urban infrastructure.

A campus with more than one public

The educational programme is unusually broad. The campus includes daycare, elementary education, technical secondary education, adult learning and a sports hall, allowing the site to serve children, teenagers, families, vocational learners and local residents. According to SMAK Architects’ project description, the primary school accommodates 496 children, while the daycare centre provides places for 50 children.

The secondary school is organised around technical teaching, with workshops for mechanics, computer science, electricity and HVAC. This is important to the project’s identity: technical education is not treated as a support function hidden behind classrooms, but as a spatial and logistical driver. Workshop floors are connected to goods lifts leading down toward the productive zone, enabling materials to move through the campus without disrupting the school’s everyday circulation.

The sports hall occupies a central position above the adult education centre. It connects directly to the primary and secondary schools but can operate independently outside school hours. A bridge from the promenade provides public access, giving the hall a civic role beyond the timetable of the schools.

Stacking education over production

The most consequential design decision is the vertical separation of uses. The project’s productive base contains approximately 5,900 square metres of SME space, according to SMAK, divided into units that can be adapted to changing market needs. Standard units of roughly 300 square metres have their own entrances from a productive street, while separate circulation supports safer and more efficient logistics.

This separation does not mean isolation. Instead, the campus places different forms of activity in close proximity while giving each the physical conditions it requires. Schools need secure access, daylight, outdoor play areas and clear orientation. Productive businesses need loading, storage, durable floors and independent movement. By stacking rather than simply zoning these uses across a large site, the scheme makes urban intensity work spatially.

The strategy also reflects a wider pressure facing Brussels and other European cities: productive activity is often displaced from central neighbourhoods by housing and offices, even as schools and public services compete for land. Campus Deleers suggests that education and light industry can coexist when their interfaces are carefully designed. The architecture is therefore not only about fitting many programmes into one footprint; it is about making a mixed city operational.

From industrial ground to civic framework

Campus Deleers forms part of a larger redevelopment beside the Brussels–Charleroi Canal. BAM Belgium describes the wider development as including school and SME functions alongside housing, commercial spaces and production units. Its information gives a broader environmental construction area of 26,000 square metres, while SMAK lists the school campus itself at 26,800 square metres. The difference indicates that the figures refer to related but not identical scopes.

That distinction matters because the project’s architectural significance lies partly in its relationship to the surrounding neighbourhood. The campus is not conceived as an isolated educational compound. It sits within a larger urban transformation, connected to canal-side routes, streets, public spaces and residential development. The school becomes one layer in a new mixed-use landscape rather than a single-purpose object placed on leftover land.

The language used by the architects—clarity, robustness and adaptability—can be read in this context. Robustness concerns more than material durability. It also describes a building able to withstand the friction of different schedules, users and forms of movement. Adaptability is similarly practical: SME units can be subdivided, public facilities can operate at different times, and the educational programme links age groups and teaching formats.

Architecture as an interface

The project’s visual logic emerges from the relationships between its parts. A productive street establishes a firm ground plane. Above it, the school volumes organise classrooms, workshops and shared facilities. The sports hall acts as a central hinge, while squares, playgrounds, bridges and entrances make the complex readable from the public realm.

Within the school, the transition between primary and secondary education is given architectural form. The first two years of secondary education and the final two years of primary education are linked into a “teenage school” for pupils aged 10 to 14, creating a gradual threshold rather than a sudden institutional break. This is a modest but telling example of how planning and pedagogy can reinforce one another.

Photography credited to Philippe van Gelooven and Evenbeeld, among others, records the campus as a substantial urban presence: layered, open in its circulation and deliberately infrastructural in character. The images also underline the contrast between the building’s scale and its everyday uses. Children move through spaces designed for safety and familiarity; workshops and businesses depend on access, delivery and separation; public facilities extend the campus beyond school hours.

A model with practical limits

Campus Deleers is compelling because it treats mixed use as a technical problem with architectural consequences. Its success depends on careful management of noise, security, servicing and shared access. The productive base cannot simply be adjacent to classrooms; it must be independently usable and safely integrated. The sports hall cannot merely be central; it must also be publicly accessible without compromising the schools.

Those conditions make the project more instructive than a generic argument for density. It demonstrates that urban mixing requires section, circulation and scheduling to work together. In Anderlecht, the school is both a place of learning and a framework for coexistence between education, enterprise and civic life. Its broader implication is clear: on constrained urban land, the most resilient public buildings may be those designed to support several communities at once.