Becoming Kanal Architecture

CIVA becomes Kanal Architecture. After a a multiyear process, we have transformed in name and location, moving into the refurbished 45,000-square-meter former Citroën garage in Brussels, designed by noAarchitecten, Sergison Bates architects, and EM2N. Side by side with the art museum Kanal – Centre Pompidou, we are expanding our activities and diversifying our audiences, while continuing our prolific program and developing our collections and research. 

In the words of artistic director Nikolaus Hirsch, who started his tenure in 2020 with the exhibition Institution Building: “With its transdisciplinary approach to architecture, landscape, and urban ecosystems, our upcoming program will address today’s most urgent societal themes and challenges, inscribing our work in the trajectory of thematic exhibitions on decolonization (Style Congo, co-curated with Sammy Baloji, 2023), on health (Sick Architecture, co-curated by Beatriz Colomina, 2023), the politics of the energy crisis (Power, 2024), and ultimately on the way we write architectural history (Chronograms, 2025).” 

Secretary general Pieter Van Damme states: “With its central location and the new public around us, we are transforming CIVA into Kanal Architecture, with a clear ambition to play a central role in the debate around the built and non-built environment. It will show how architecture shapes society and vice versa. As a museum for architecture, landscape, and ecosystems it will help us to explore how we live together in an increasingly antagonistic world.”

Exhibitions and public programs
Our new home, which nearly triples our exhibition spaces, will open on 28 November 2026. “Brussels” is blamed for everything. The city has become a symbol of dysfunction, bureaucratization, and fragmentation. The inaugural exhibition presents a different view: a critical homage that positions Brussels as a pioneering laboratory for new spatial practices. Further exhibitions will include a monographic exhibition on Bas Smets and the potentials of “planning climates” (April 2027), a thematic show on the architecture of data curated by Marina Otero Verzier (October 2027), and a monographic exhibition on Lucien and Simone Kroll, which will draw on unseen material from the new depot of the Kroll archive at Kanal Architecture (April 2028).

Collections 
Constantly questioned and reinterpreted, the collections of Kanal Architecture form the base of a critical inquiry into the current status of architecture. After exhibitions by artist Vincent Meessen on Léon Sneyers and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Anna Puigjaner / MAIO on the CUBEX kitchen, and Stefaan Vervoort’s Marcel Broodthaers–The Architect is Absent, the Research in Residence program will continue with an exhibition by architectural historians Johan Lagae and Robby Fivez entitled The Architecture of Foreign Affairs, based on a Congolese project by Italian architect Eugène Palumbo and other material from Kanal Architecture’s post-colonial archives.

Salon
The Salon, a collaboration between Kanal Architecture and Kanal—Centre Pompidou, is a public, multifunctional space for reading, working, and discourse. Designed by CENTRAL, Sophie Dars, and Pierre Leguillon, the space is open and free to all. More than a library, the Salon is a site of knowledge production, for coworking and informal encounters, and will host editorial projects drawn from the books, magazines, and other printed matter from the collections.

Playground 
Commissioned by Kanal—Centre Pompidou and Kanal Architecture, and curated by Grégory Castéra and Nikolaus Hirsch, London-based collective Assemble creates a large playscape where anyone, aged four and up, can build, explore, and experiment freely. The design was developed in close collaboration with schools from the surrounding neighborhoods. Drawing on the legacy of postwar adventure playgrounds, as well as on playscapes imagined by twentieth-century artists and architects, the project affirms play as a fundamental source of transformation—within Kanal and society at large. 

Artistic director: Nikolaus Hirsch / Secretary general: Pieter Van Damme / Press: Valérie Roucou, vroucou@kanal.brussels