Design Museum Gent Reopens With a Wing Built From the City’s Waste

Design Museum Gent, Belgium’s largest design museum, reopened on 3 October after four years of work and a renovation that cost €21 million. Its new 2,200-square-metre wing, designed by the London practice Carmody Groarke with the Belgian firms ATAMA and RE-ST, is built of timber and white brick, and the facade uses more than 82,000 bricks pressed from Ghent’s own municipal waste.

The brick. The Brussels materials studio BC materials developed the Gent Waste Brick with the museum. Each brick contains 63 per cent recycled aggregates from the city’s waste stream and cures in the open air through lime carbonation, which gives it about a third of the embodied carbon of a fired clay brick. A team of two produced 82,000 blocks at Het Arsenaal, less than five kilometres from the museum, between February and July 2024.

The building. The wing joins three historic buildings, among them the 18th-century Hotel de Coninck, whose brick dimensions the new bricks repeat, into a museum of 8,600 square metres. It holds six zones, from an art-handling floor in the basement to an event space on the fourth floor, and a city room at street level, the Stadskamer, which is free to enter.

The opening. Director Katrien Laporte opens with four exhibitions, among them Public Matter(s): Design and Democracy, curated by Amelie Klein and Vera Sacchetti. The collection holds more than 24,000 objects, about 500 of them on display. Design Fest Gent runs with free entry until 11 October.

The Gent Waste Brick was certified for exterior facades in September 2022, and its production was funded in part by Circular Flanders and the City of Ghent. A city that presses facade bricks from its own waste a few kilometres from the building site now has a material it can make again for its next project.

The museum pairs the new wing with a free city room at street level, which Laporte describes as a place where the community can make sense of the present together. Six months earlier, studios at Salone del Mobile 2026 showed the same turn toward local, recovered material in furniture and objects.