La MéMé: The Medical Facility Student Complex

La MéMé: The Medical Facility Student Complex

La MéMé

The building project that garnered international attention and became an icon of Kroll’s design philosophy of participatory architecture, the Medical Facility’s student complex at the Catholic University of Louvain stands out as a unique figure within its surroundings. Kroll’s goal was to involve the building’s potential residents in the planning and building process from the start, resulting in a group design process facilitated through a simple traditional planning grid. It allowed for a level of organization sufficient enough to keep the overall blueprint and layouts in line in spite of how many heads were in the project. Students were already making slight modifications to their living quarters beforehand, but kept from making any drastic changes that would mark the walls or have any lasting impact.They became very involved upon joining the project, sketching their new living spaces from the ground up.
Wrestling for control from the university and the construction company was a key effort in this project specially. It was the intention to make every aspect as heterogeneous as the construction company would allow. Various materials were used in the construction of the building as per the resident designers’ requests. Some workmen were even invited to contribute parts to “their own taste”. The result was a hodgepodge of different takes on design concepts that are loosely related and stitched together to form a community quilt that contains traces of both individuals and the participants as a collective. Lucien Kroll characterizes much of this project as a “confrontation with industry” (Kroll 90).

Lucien Kroll

Kroll, Lucien. Buildings and Projects. Rizzoli, 1987. 85-97

Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

1968-1969

Lucien Kroll

Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart

Physical Print

English

Buildings and Projects Journal