It is built on a pre-fabricated concrete structure and is made up of a posts and bars frame with a specific type of assembly of the horizontal and vertical parts. The 12-metre-high posts are complete with brackets to hold the ceiling parts. The bars used are I-shaped constant inertia bars. The purlins are of the same type (25 cm wide and 51 cm high), but are laid "upside-down". The upper purlin web is the only part to require support thanks to a special cutting procedure. The whole assembly is pinned together. The shaft introduced by TCA’s design that runs along the whole thickness of one of the floors is an important feature – it saves a considerable amount of façade siding surface by permitting a gain of roughly 40 cm thickness around the entire perimeter of the building!

The first level of the shopping centre houses a car park with a 40,000 m² cellular slab floor. The slabs are set on Neoprene supports and then covered with a 5-cm-thick compression coating.

On the next floor we find a 10,000 m² covered hypermarket. The covering is made of steel trays with thermal insulation and a dual-layer sealant. An area of almost 30,000 m² which is to be used for future shopping boutiques has, for its part, been covered with cellular paving slabs, followed by insulation and a dual-layer sealant. A square screen, that is 8 metres down each side, acts as a support for the "heavy" concrete structure whilst a screen that is 8 metres wide and 16 metres long carries the "light" covering made up of steel trays that is found on the first floor over a surface area of 10,000 m².

In order to stick to the strict time limits, the logistics had to be accurate down to the tiniest detail, from the circulation to the storage to the timely completion of the TCA construction plans and so on. An average of 20 lorries per day were bringing supplies to the building site during this phase and high points of as many as 35 lorries per day were even recorded! And the workforce was not lacking either: four teams worked together, each using its own crane.

Pre-fabricated concrete cornices were used to provide the architectural "nerve structure" of the building. These cornices are sloped to 45° and form a type of courtyard that is 2.5 m wide around the building’s perimeter. These cornices are then connected at their upper part to the building structure.

The walls of the shopping centre are made up of a breeze block structure that is 20 cm thick and to which thermal insulation has been applied. This structure is furthermore connected to external brickwork siding. The car park is, however, "open to the elements".

Those involved in this project, which was inaugurated in March 1995, were Codic, Georges Pierson and his team, the architects from the Sart Tilman workshop, TCA, the Wust and Galère Group, PPB for the pre-fabricated concrete elements, and Seco for the control.

2,500 m² of shopping area.

Four architects shared the work, which was co-ordinated by Claude Strebelle and LINH QUANG TIAN. They were Bruno Albert, Bernard Herbecq, Philippe Gérard and François Lemaire.

This site offers 22,000 m² of shops, residences and underground car parks. The project was carried out in 1993 by Codic and the Assar architects who were successful in revamping Brussels’ St Gilles area thanks to a deliberately imitative and discrete process.