London architects Sergison Bates have won the international competition to convert the Citroën Yser Garage in Brussels – once Europe’s largest car factory – into a new branch of the Pompidou Centre art museum.

The firm, along with Zurich studio EM2N and Brussels practice Aarchitecten, have been selected ahead of the likes of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Christ & Gantenbein and OMA for the high-profile commission – the largest new museum in the Belgian capital since the beginning of the 20th century.

The attraction, called KANAL - Centre Pompidou, will bring together a Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, an architecture centre run by the CIVA Foundation and public spaces devoted to culture, education and leisure. The brief calls for the facility to be “open to the city and its districts, welcoming as many people as possible and serving as a genuine tool for life in the community.”

The Citroën Yser Garage, located on Place de l’Yse, was operated by automobile manufacturer André Citroën in the early 1930s. The 16,500sq m (177.600sq ft) building – made largely of glass, steel and concrete – was designed by the French architect Maurice-Jacques Ravazé and his Belgian contemporaries Alexis Dumont and Marcel Van Goethem. Imagined as a “cathedral of space and light”, the showroom is a 21m (68.8ft) high glass palace, characterised by a rounded curtain wall extending from the ground floor to the roof.

Sergison Bates’ winning design, titled ‘A Stage for Brussels’, highlights these iconic existing elements, with the emptied and restructured showroom set to become KANAL’s ‘display window’, home to installations, performances and concerts on the ground floor, and a restaurant on the third floor.

Meanwhile, the design team have revealed that the building's large white outdoor frieze will be extended “so as to encircle the whole building in the form of an electronic display sign that can be used to communicate information or that can be integrated in an artistic project.”

Inside, a transverse ‘street’ will cross the expanded site, measuring 35,000sq m (376,700sq ft), giving access to three large ‘boxes in the box’, which will be inserted in the former workshops and will accommodate the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the CIVA Foundation and a 400-seat auditorium.

According to the architects, this solution will allow the climatic conditions of the different spaces to be controlled, while allowing exhibition spaces spread out over four floors of varying heights to be configured in different setups.

The jury of the international competition praised the project as being “exceptionally well integrated into its context.”

Construction will begin in the autumn of 2019 and will be phased over several stages until the official opening in late 2022. The budget has been set at €125m (US$154m, £109m).

Ninety-two practices expressed their interest in the project after the first phase of the competition was launched in April 2017. A star-studded longlist, included Bjarke Ingels Group, Foster + Partners, Snøhetta, MVRDV, David Chipperfield Architects, Zaha Hadid Architects and the studio of Richard Rogers – who designed the original landmark Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1977 with Renzo Piano.

The Swiss architect Roger Diener led the jury, which also included the chief architect of the Brussels-Capital Region and the president of the Centre Pompidou.

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