The Arts Quarter, De Krook to Citadelpark

De Krook

Ghent's city library on the Scheldt bend, free to walk into.

You're standing at the Scheldt bend that gave this building its name, and the library is free to walk into. Go in. De Krook opened in 2017, designed by the Ghent practice Coussée and Goris with the Catalan studio RCR Arquitectes, who won the Pritzker Prize that same year. What they built is a stack of flat plateaus with the steel frame left bare, so the whole structure reads as long shelves laid one above the other along the water.

The city library fills most of it, university labs and the imec research center take the rest, and the café looks across the bend into the old center. Take a few minutes to walk the ground floor and the café before you head south. One planning note before you start: the Boekentoren opens its public rooms on weekdays only, and the MSK and S.M.A.K. shut on Mondays, so Tuesday to Friday is when everything on this walk is open.

Vooruit

The socialist movement's festival hall, now the arts center VIERNULVIER.

Look up at the lettering: Vooruit, which is Dutch for Forward. Ghent's socialist movement built this as its own festival hall, a place for members to gather, celebrate and stage plays, and it is the reason a quarter of modest streets south of the center has a building of this size in it. The name over the door now belongs to the arts center VIERNULVIER, which programs the building and keeps it busy most nights of the week. Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat runs along its side, and for the students who cross it daily the street is simply the corridor between lecture halls. Walk it on a weekday afternoon and you'll pass more bicycles than cars, most of them going the same way you are, south and uphill. That is also why the hall stands here: the movement that paid for it counted its members in streets like this one, and it wanted a place they could reach on foot after work.