Team: Infrabel; Atelier Kempe Thill; Canevas

Belgium's rail infrastructure manager Infrabel has built a school, set around a track bed, where it trains its staff in railway maintenance and construction work. The bright and airy building can also be used for conferences and meetings of all kinds. The Infrabel Academy is a setting for an oft-neglected field of activity, namely specialised adult education. Concepts such as lifelong learning are gradually gaining broad acceptance, but the spaces where such learning takes place often lack the infrastructure and scale to make it inspiring and attractive.

Brussels public transport company STIB/MIVB's metro trains and trams and its nationwide counterpart SNCB/NMBS's suburban S trains run past the building, which sits majestically nestled between social housing blocks, old hangars and the eye-catching Bruxelles-Ouest/Brussel-West station. In fact, the building is built over an operational metro tunnel. Train tracks are also a theme inside, with track systems exhibited in the corridors and mezzanines. In other words, this is a building where contemporary architecture interfaces with state-of-the-art railway technologies.

The Covid Safe Ticket applies.