In November 2019, London-based Carmody Groarke and Ghent firm TRANS architectuur | stedenbouw, now known as ATAMA, won the Baumeister international competition to design an extension for Design Museum Gent, Belgium's largest design museum, located in Ghent's historic center. At the time, the museum comprised three buildings: the eighteenth-century Hotel de Coninck, the Leten House, with a sixteenth-century core, and a 1992 wing. After four years of renovation and expansion, the museum reopened on October 3, 2026, within the UNESCO World Heritage city center. The project combines the restoration of these historic buildings with a new wing designed by Carmody Groarke and ATAMA, alongside the restoration work led by RE-ST architectenvennootschap. The museum's collection spans design objects from the fourteenth century to the present, and the renewed building adds spaces for lectures, workshops, exhibitions and events, framing design as something visitors can use and engage with directly rather than only view.
The museum's transformation was guided by a question posed at the outset of the design process: "Is this a museum for me?" In 2025, a citizens' panel called DE40, composed of forty Ghent residents, was formed to help answer it, examining how Design Museum Gent could become accessible and relevant to a broad audience regardless of background or prior design knowledge. Their input shaped the project's conception as a "third space" within the public realm: an open environment for meeting, learning, creating and discovering, rather than a conventional display-only museum. The guiding premise, as stated by the museum, is that a design museum should not only display design, but use, test and embody it. This also frames the institution as a publicly accessible space meant to serve local communities and neighborhoods.
The museum's historic core includes the Hotel de Coninck, an eighteenth-century rococo mansion at Jan Breydelstraat 5-7, long organized around an inner courtyard. Before the renovation, this courtyard was flanked by a neglected southern passage and an unused plot at the center of the site. The new wing allows the courtyard to function fully as a garden, now serving as the museum's heart and a central point of orientation for visitors. The broader masterplan balances conservation with new construction: historic interiors have been restored, while later additions to the building have been adapted to provide more space and improved climate control. Materials were reused where possible, and sustainable solutions were applied throughout the renovation.
The new wing links the museum's existing buildings into a single visitor route, organized into six zones structured around three principles: welcoming, open and adaptable. At basement level, an art-handling area gives visitors a view into the museum's behind-the-scenes operations. From there, the route continues through the Stadskamer (reception and shop), the Forum (lecture space), the Atelier (workshop space) and the Vitrine (temporary exhibitions), before reaching the Loft on the fourth floor, an event space with views over Ghent. The new wing's brick dimensions match those of the historic Hotel de Coninck, and its light tone relates to the houses along Drabstraat, with the composition drawing on the scale of Ghent's traditional guild houses and merchant homes. The facade is built from Gent Waste Brick, a lime-cured brick made from locally sourced municipal waste rather than fired in a kiln, reducing its environmental footprint. More than 82,000 of these bricks were produced locally at Het Arsenaal in Ghent, a process the public could follow live.
Other recent news about heritage protection and restoration includes the launch of a citizen campaign in Lima, led by Red Lima Milenaria, seeking UNESCO recognition for pre-colonial sites in the Peruvian capital. The campaign seeks to improve conservation conditions and public awareness of the sites that resisted European colonization by promoting the nomination of a selection of structures for inscription on UNESCO's World Heritage List. On September 16, 2026, Google announced the redevelopment of Chicago's Thompson Center, a postmodern architectural landmark designed by Helmut Jahn and completed in 1985, as a space for work, culture and community. London-based art, architecture, and design collective Assemble recently announced a new workspace project in the English capital, involving the transformation of a Grade II*-listed historic building into a new creative and light industrial workspace.
