Design Museum Gent Reopening: A Wing Built From the City’s Own Waste

The Design Museum Gent reopening on 3 October 2026 gave Belgium its largest design museum — and gave the city a building made, in part, from itself. After four years of renovation and expansion, the museum reopened in Ghent’s historic centre with a new wing whose pale façade is built from bricks pressed out of local municipal waste (ArchDaily). The collection spans design objects from the fourteenth century to the present, and the renewed museum now covers 8,600 square metres in total (MaterialDistrict).

Information verified through 29 October 2026.

Design Museum Gent reopening: the final piece of a fragmented site

Before this project, the museum was three buildings that did not quite add up to one visit. There was the eighteenth-century Hotel de Coninck, the Leten House with a sixteenth-century core, and a 1992 wing, arranged around a courtyard with a neglected passage and an unused plot at its centre (ArchDaily).

London-based Carmody Groarke and Ghent firm ATAMA — then called TRANS architectuur | stedenbouw — won the international competition for the extension in November 2019, with RE-ST leading restoration of the historic buildings (ArchDaily). Their new wing fills that last vacant plot. It adds 2,200 square metres, takes the museum to 8,600 square metres including 3,700 square metres of exhibition space, and links the older buildings into a single visitor route (Dezeen).

“We’ve got this idea of an ensemble of four buildings,” Carmody Groarke co-founder Kevin Carmody told Dezeen. “The new building makes sense of three older buildings by connecting them physically in terms of accessibility, but also making the ensemble orient itself around this beautiful courtyard” (Dezeen).

Inside, the route runs through six zones: an art-handling area at basement level where visitors can watch behind-the-scenes work, then reception and shop, a lecture space, workshops, temporary exhibitions, and an event space on the fourth floor with views over Ghent (ArchDaily). The main entrance has moved to Drabstraat, and its door is a 3D-printed aluminium piece by Antwerp studio Unfold (Dezeen).

What is the Gent Waste Brick made from?

The façade is the headline, and it earns it. The Gent Waste Brick is made from 63% recycled municipal waste from the city of Ghent — crushed concrete and glass, with waste glass from windows and car windscreens and porcelain also named among the ingredients (Local Works Studio; MaterialDistrict).

No kiln is involved. The mix is combined with hydrated lime, pressed, and left to harden as the lime absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (Fast Company). More than 82,000 bricks were produced locally at Het Arsenaal in Ghent, a former railway repair yard, in a process the public could follow — and, through the museum’s engagement programme, residents could help make a brick themselves (ArchDaily; Local Works Studio).

The numbers behind the claim are specific. A Gent Waste Brick carries 0.17 kg CO2e per kilogram against 0.54 for a typical Belgian clay brick over a 60-year life cycle — about one third — and using it on this façade is calculated to save 107 tonnes of CO2e (Local Works Studio). The brick was certified for façade use in September 2022 by the Belgian Construction Certification Association, after testing against European norms (Local Works Studio).

Its size is not standard either. The bricks borrow their dimensions from the historic Hotel de Coninck next door, and their light tone relates to the houses along Drabstraat (Dezeen). The sloping profile of the wing nods to Ghent’s traditional gabled houses (Dezeen).

Carmody Groarke Design Museum Gent extension: timber inside, questions outside

Behind the brick sits timber. The wing’s timber structure is left exposed throughout, paired with white walls and wooden floors, and the ground floor holds an oversized earth column made using on-site construction waste (Dezeen). Materials were reused where possible across the wider renovation, and historic interiors in the Hotel de Coninck were restored rather than replaced (ArchDaily).

The museum also tried to redesign who it is for. In 2025 a citizens’ panel of forty Ghent residents, called DE40, was formed around one question — “Is this a museum for me?” — and its input shaped the idea of the museum as a “third space” for meeting, learning and making, not just looking (ArchDaily). The opening exhibition, Public Matter(s), takes up design and democracy, and the exhibition design pairs clay-plastered walls with a circular steel construction system (MaterialDistrict).

“If we want to build differently, we first need to change our perception of materials and how we value them,” Farah Fervel of BC Materials told Fast Company, pointing to certification, regulation and scale as the hard parts of working this way (Fast Company).

Analysis: Plenty of buildings claim recycled content. Few put the recycled material on the outside, at street scale, in a protected historic centre, and publish the carbon arithmetic beside it. That is what makes Gent worth watching beyond one reopening weekend. The brick was reverse-designed for a single job — one façade, one city’s waste streams, one historic brick size — rather than engineered for every possible use. If that approach travels, the lesson is not “use this brick.” It is that a material can be specified the way a building is: for a place, from that place. The test now is duller and harder. Does the façade weather well? Do other clients order a second production run? A prototype that becomes a product changes construction. A prototype that stays a museum piece changes only the museum.

Sources

1. https://www.archdaily.com/1186376/design-museum-gent-reopens-with-new-wing-by-carmody-groarke-and-atama
2. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/10/01/carmody-groarke-design-museum-gent/
3. https://materialdistrict.com/article/waste-based-brick-and-timber-shape-new-wing-of-design-museum-gent/
4. https://www.fastcompany.com/91626072/design-museum-gent-annex-bricks-made-from-rubble-and-waste
5. https://localworksstudio.com/projects/low-carbon-construction/