Mich Rossiter
is an architectural designer based in London + Rotterdam[email protected]
How to be both is an architectural intervention in Heyvaert, a ground-zero for urban contestation in Brussels. The project proposes the transformative reuse of a heritage-listed former tannery into a closely-knit social housing offering, creative hub, youth club, neighbourhood canteen, commercial units and the retention of the existing tenant, a second-hand car exporter. All of these new spaces orbit and land in a central ‘polyvalent yard’, through which daily negotiations for access, delivery, leisure and noise are all platformed.
At the urban scale, the proposal opens its cluttered heart to an anticipated linear park which retraces the banks the former Sennette river and the nearby Plaine de Liverpool, making the ‘polyvalent yard’ a node between local amenities and well-positioned to become an asset of community value.
Blending the architecture of the industrial, with borrowed forms from the monolithic tannery below, much of the proposal is housed in top-up volumes which exploit the oversized structural foundations built over a century ago to ward off the marshy geology of the Senne basin. The design balances site-specific, programme-specific design on one hand and the baked-in possibility for future adaptation in the other, resulting in a vast mass timber structural lattice around which prefabricated hempcrete-filled panels form the breathable envelope of the architecture.
What if you had an atelier in your apartment? A workshop beneath your flat? A studio in your studio? What if your next-door neighbours were mushroom farmers, chair designers or second-hand car exporters? How can you live in a community where the contradictions and inconveniences of the city aren’t shied away from, but confronted and embraced? This graduation project humbly explores what happens when you don’t have to decide. It explores How to be both.
Colophon
How to be both was produced by Mich Rossiter as part of the Urban Architecture graduation studio at Bouwkunde, TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Netherlands between November 2025 and June 2026.
All material was produced by Mich Rossiter, unless otherwise stated. Every effort has been made to credit relevant authors, where necessary.
Tutors
Elsbeth Ronner
Leeke Reinders
Studio
Urban Architecture
Chaired by Paul Vermeulen
1. House everyone
How to provide both sufficient and pleasurable housing?
2. Listen to the real experts
How to be both a listener to the people of Heyvaert and a guest in their home, respecting their time and lived experience?
3. Exploit the loophole
How to both confront the realities of financial and regulatory constraints and leverage the opportunities of banal aberrations?
4. Cherish the existing
How to be both gentle with existing fabrics and ensure they are hard-working for future generations?
5. Confront dwelling with making
How to calibrate where dwelling and making coexist, and where they segregate?
6. Reframe comfort
How to make comfortable spaces which are passive and independent of mechanical climatic systems?
7. Persuade through alternative media
How to be both incisive and reach beyond the industry’s echo chamber?