A Fire at Kanal Was Out by Nine, With a November Opening on the Other Side of It

Fire broke out on Monday 6 July at the construction site of Kanal-Centre Pompidou, the contemporary art museum being built near Place Sainctelette in Brussels. It started in a technical room beneath the roof. The Brussels Fire Brigade brought it under control over several hours and had it fully extinguished by nine in the evening, and nobody was hurt, because no staff were in the building when it started. A brigade spokesman, Walter Derieuw, said crews stayed on site afterwards. The cause had not been established.

The building is the former Citroen garage, a showroom and workshop from the 1930s standing on the canal, bought by the Brussels Region in 2015 and under conversion ever since in partnership with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The museum is due to open in November.

A fire on a site four months from an opening is a schedule question before it is anything else. Conversions of large interwar industrial buildings carry very little slack: the structure is listed in substance if not always in law, the services have to be threaded through a frame that was never designed for them, and the technical rooms under a roof of that span are exactly where the plant that a museum depends on sits. Climate control is not a fitting out detail in a building meant to borrow art from other institutions. It is the precondition for being lent anything at all.

The wider stake is the canal. Kanal is the anchor of a regeneration strategy for a stretch of Brussels the city spent most of the twentieth century turning its back on, dividing rather than joining the two halves of the region. Putting a museum of that scale on the water is a bet that the axis can be reversed, and the bet only pays if the building opens and keeps opening.

There is an institutional stake too. Brussels has spent years as a European capital whose modern art collection has had no permanent home to be seen in, an absence that became a standing embarrassment rather than a temporary inconvenience. Kanal is the answer to that, which is why a technical room catching fire in July is being counted in weeks rather than in euros.