picture Stijn Bollaert

read here - Winnaar ARC25 Transformatie en Renovatie Award: Kasteel in Antwerpen voor Poot Architectuur

read here - De mooiste architectuur staat in het 'lelijkste land ter wereld'

read here - Belgische bureaus domineren ARC25 Awards

Jury Report – Transformation and Renovation – ARC Awards 2025

Layered Beauty

The jury of the ARC25 Transformation and Renovation Award nominated three projects in which a new layer is added to an existing building. Old and new enter into a dialogue that stretches from the past towards the future. Kasteel, the school designed by Poot Architectuur, surpasses the other nominees through an approach that is at once effective, restrained, and poetic.

Text by Floortje Keijzer

From more than sixty submissions for the ARC25 Transformation and Renovation Award, the editorial board of de Architect selected forty projects for the longlist of this new award. During the jury deliberations, praise was expressed for M127 in Antwerp (Ono Architectuur), the Duivenhuis at Artis in Amsterdam (Atelierfront) and Primary School De Edison in Antwerp (Stuhlmacher Korteknie Architecten). There was also much appreciation for De Muziekwerf in Rotterdam (Powerhouse) and two educational buildings on the Leiden University campus: Gorleus (Civic) and Herta Mohr (De Zwarte Hond). These projects underline the significance of transformation and renovation assignments for the development of architecture in the Low Countries.

Three projects stood out from the start on the jury’s shortlist: De Nederlandsche Bank in Amsterdam by Mecanoo, secondary school Kasteel in Antwerp’s Kasteelstraat by Poot Architectuur, and Deelfabriek in Kortrijk by Atama Architects. These projects distinguish themselves through a highly individual architectural language that engages directly with the existing architecture while surprising and renewing.

The jury commends the architects’ modest stance towards the existing buildings. They add a bold new layer to structures with histories that are sometimes well known, but at other times obscured over the years. Not as a thin veneer, but as a layered addition that enriches the architecture with beauty and breathes new life into the existing building. In this way, the architecture is passed on sustainably to future generations.

Jury chair Jan Peter Wingender captured it aptly: ‘With her architecture, Sarah Poot weaves a web of time that connects past, present and an unknown future. That delicate handling of time is what makes Kasteel so exceptional.’

– Winner –

Secondary School Kasteel in Antwerp (BE)
by Poot Architectuur

Photography: Stijn Bollaert

Kasteel, a secondary school in the heart of Antwerp, has a large, stately entrance on Kasteelstraat. The building itself is embedded in the dense urban fabric, with its back to the surrounding developments and its façades facing an enclosed courtyard. Poot Architectuur transformed this 1905 school building, with its high ceilings and distinctive details, combining a careful restoration with new interventions.

The design frees the original architecture from later, careless additions. Central to the project is the pursuit of spatial, technical and aesthetic coherence through a consistent formal language mediating between the character of the existing building and its new use. Interior and fixed furniture were integrated into the architectural design, with a focus on calmness. Not as a ‘loose and temporary’ layer, but through functional and technical integration.

The courtyard has been enriched with a glass canopy in deep red steel, running around the perimeter. This seemingly incidental intervention connects the buildings and makes the rear courtyard the heart of the school. Separate staircases are linked together, allowing pupils to move between classrooms under cover. The paving has been removed and the courtyard greened. The building supports multiple uses: alongside school functions, there is space for sport, dance and media, also outside school hours.

The jury was impressed by the way the architects turned an absence—the lack of connections between classrooms—into the very heart of the project: by creating a simple breakthrough and an enfilade that gives direction to contemporary learning.

‘Reuse in architecture confronts us with the question of how we deal with the residue of time,’ noted Jan Peter Wingender. ‘A place, a building, a bygone typology, materials, atmosphere, fragments of a history of use. Sarah Poot listened. She adapted, restored, added. Not too much. Not too little. Just enough.’

Jury ARC25 Transformation and Renovation Award

Jan Peter Wingender – Chair
Architect Jan Peter Wingender is co-founder and partner of the Amsterdam-based architecture practice Office Winhov. His work focuses on urban ensembles, residential buildings, civic and public programmes, and the renovation and adaptive reuse of existing, often listed buildings. Wingender studied at TU Eindhoven and the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam.

Maarten van Kesteren
Maarten van Kesteren graduated in 2014 as an architect from TU Delft. He worked at several architecture firms and, with his own practice, created art installations. In 2024, for the transformation of vocational school Nimeto in Utrecht, he received the Abe Bonnema Prize for Young Architects, the Rietveld Prize, the Truus Schröder Prize, the Golden Pyramid, the NRP Gulden Feniks and the ARC24 Architecture Award.

Sofie De Caigny
Sofie De Caigny is an architectural historian, curator and author. She obtained her doctorate at KU Leuven and worked at the Flanders Architecture Institute, initially as head of collections and from 2018 to 2024 as director. She is currently Chair of the Commission for Environmental Quality and Cultural Heritage in Rotterdam and Head of Collections at the Nieuwe Instituut.

Mark Pimlott
Mark Pimlott is a designer, artist, writer and educator. He produces photography and artworks for public spaces and interiors. He writes on architecture and urbanism and is currently working on a nineteenth-century country house and its cottages in England. From 2002 to 2025, Pimlott was affiliated with the Architectural Design/Interiors department of TU Delft, where he recently completed his PhD Means to a Beginning.

Floortje Keijzer – Secretary
Floortje Keijzer is an architect, architectural historian and editor at de Architect. Before founding her own practice in Amsterdam in 2008, she worked for OMA and Studio JVM, among others. Within de Architect, she focuses on exemplary projects, the use of historic typologies and traditional biobased materials in a contemporary form.