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Text description provided by the architects. The Tower of Balance is one of the twelve creations by six artists and architects invited to design outdoor art installations for the 4th Triennale Bruges 2024 from April 13 – September 1, 2024, at the World Heritage City of Bruges, Belgium. The theme of this year’s event is “Spaces of Possibility,” with Shendy Gardin and Sevie Tsampalla as curators, inviting artists to discover potential in the World Heritage City of Bruges by incorporating art in different areas.
The Tower of Balance by Boonserm Premthada, one of the architects, conveys the “sound” of the ancient wooden bell tower hidden under a layer of bricks. This Tower of Balance, without the cladding bricks, reveals the hidden structure to the outside and emits the familiar bell sound to the local residents, connecting the forgotten outskirt of the city, transforming it into a space of possibility for urban expansion, and creating a balance between the old town and the modern city where the bell sound from the past is still ringing and remains the spirit of the place.
Sound of Structure – The ivory-colored wooden bell tower is 18 meters high, with a square spiral staircase as the centerpiece. At the end of the staircase on the highest floor hangs the bell from the overhead structure. Attached to each side at different levels of the bell tower are square and circular balconies. Each balcony overlooks landmarks of Bruges: the three-bell towers, the Abbey of Sint-Godelieveabdij, and the sprawling city in the south of Bruges. This wooden bell is a marker of Bruges’s new city, but at the same time, it reminisces how the old town was built, starting with the bell tower as the city’s heart.
Sound of Bruges – When designing for Spaces of Possibility, I deliberately avoided installing my creation in the old town because we should respect the place. The densely populated area of Bruges Old Town is a world heritage site with beauty and history that should remain untouched, not to mention the fact that it has already undergone so many renovations throughout its long history that it is now complete in all aspects. The new bell tower is in a vacant, unused area on the southern edge of the oval-shaped city, connecting the world heritage site with the expanding new city in the south. Spaces of Possibility, in my interpretation, is about making the world heritage city of Bruges a city where people can live. We aim to create a “Balance” among differences found in the city: the new and the old structures, conservation and development, the present and the past, local people and tourists, culture and history and economy, manmade and natural creations, space and density, hills and plains, closed and open areas, industrial and natural materials, living outdoors and indoors, progress and sustainability, and so on. The idea behind the new bell tower is not to create another “landmark” but to design a “sound structure” to create new “traffic” of people and various activities for the local residents, as well as remind them of the valuable memories of the bell as a surviving ancestral legacy.
Sound of Creative Renovation—The wooden bell tower sits on a grassy slope running along the main road down to the Abbey. This area is empty and serves no function other than occasionally serving as a bypass. The bell tower is situated midway along the slope and, when viewed from the main road, looks like a “tower buried in the ground,” resulting in a balance between irregular angles and perspectives.
The tower’s structure is made up of small pieces of pine wood. These small pieces are assembled and then placed, laid, overlapped, clamped, bent, fastened, drilled, nailed, screwed, hung, and so on, according to the “basic methods” of traditional woodwork hidden within the brick walls commonly found in this city. We took this concept and “renovated” it to create a light, thin, and open structure that allows humans to feel the wind, sun, rain, and temperature of that specific area. This structure also “brings back” the sound of the bell from the 13th century to “improve the city with sound.” We call this “creative renovation” instead of “physical renovation.”
Today, the bell tower is a new assembly point for the community. Happiness is the sight of the smiley faces of the people who make their way up the wooden bell tower to ring the bell. This is a lifelong bond between the community and the city’s sound. Now is the time for the locals to recreate this sound for themselves. The bell tower in the past served to tell the time, wake up the people, and remind them of their daily schedule from dawn until dusk. The bell sound is a cultural inheritance that lifts the “spirit” of the city. The sound reverberates in the air, enveloping the land, leaving a “footprint” and “air print,” bringing the city to life and chiming in harmony with history and the contemporary way of life.
Sound of Sustainability – The Tower of Balance is a collaborative learning experience between the architect and the curators who come from different hemispheres to search for Spaces of Possibility in terms of nature, local knowledge, history, culture, sensation, touch, and atmosphere, and make sense of them all. Sound is more than something we hear; it also brings together people, space, nature, atmosphere, spirit, and activities to build a sustainable community that expands from the old city.
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