The Havenhuis, Dutch for port house, stands at Zaha Hadidplein 1 on the Kattendijkdok, north of the old city. It opened on 22 September 2016 as the headquarters of the Antwerp Port Authority, which used it to bring about 500 staff together under one roof. Zaha Hadid, whose design won the competition in January 2009, did not see it finished. She died in March 2016, and the city council renamed the square in front of the building after her.

A fire station first

The lower half is older than the glass and younger than it looks. In 1912 the city approved a fire station by its chief building officer, Alexis Van Mechelen. The First World War held up the work, Van Mechelen died in 1919, and his successor, Emiel Van Averbeke, completed it in October 1922. Its palazzo front was modelled on the Hanseatic House, which stood where the MAS museum on the Eilandje stands now, and that resemblance is why some guides date the station centuries too early.

The model was a serious one. The Hanseatic House, or Oostershuis, was built around 1560 to a design by Cornelis Floris, the sculptor-architect of the Antwerp town hall, as the trading post of the Hanseatic merchants, successor to their older kontor in Bruges. The kontor closed in 1593, and the building itself burned down in 1893. Nineteen years later the city borrowed its outline for a fire station, which is either an irony or a precaution.

Four wings of three storeys surround a courtyard where the brigade tested its hoses twice a week, and six large doors on the east side let the engines out. The station has caught fire itself: on 26 April 1954 a roof fire destroyed three of its four roof sections, and only the southern one keeps its original timber. The building became a protected monument in April 2000, and the fire service moved out in 2009.

The glass on top

In 2007 the Port Authority decided to put its technical and administrative staff in one building, because its 1990s offices on the Eilandje had grown too small. Five practices were shortlisted in 2008. Hadid’s scheme lifts a new volume, 105 metres long and weighing 1,500 tonnes, over the old courtyard on two concrete cores that hold the stairs and lifts, with V-shaped steel columns landing in the atrium below. The facade is made of triangular glass panels, some clear and some back-painted, each rotated slightly against its neighbours so the surface breaks up the light. The port put the cost at €55 million.

Antwerp has argued ever since about whether it is a ship or a diamond. Joris Pauwels, project director at Zaha Hadid Architects, has said that “all these connotations are there”, but that “the shape of the volume is more to do with how it reacts to the external context.” The port’s chief executive at the opening, Eddy Bruyninckx, settled it more briskly: “Be it a diamond, be it a ship, we are happy to live in it.”

Hadid insisted that the brick station stay, and the new volume was set above it so the 1922 front is still seen from the square. That was the right call, because the Havenhuis works only as a pair: the old building keeps to the street and the glass does the showing off. Pauwels put it in practical terms. “If we had made something with repetitions of windows and bays like the existing building, it wouldn’t have worked,” he said. It was the second Hadid building completed after her death, after the maritime terminal in Salerno, Italy, which opened that April.

Inside, the old and new halves do different jobs. The engine garages of 1922 now serve as reading rooms, and the courtyard where the hoses were tested is covered by a glass roof, fixed to anchor holes above the original windows. Upstairs, the offices are largely open plan, designed for activity-based working, with an auditorium and a panoramic boardroom facing the harbour on the seventh floor. The building has a BREEAM rating of Very Good and parking for 190 bicycles.

The obvious comparison is in Hamburg. The city’s Elbphilharmonie, by Herzog and de Meuron, also puts a glass crown on a brick port building, the Kaispeicher A warehouse of 1963, and it opened on 11 January 2017, less than four months after the Havenhuis. It cost about €866 million. Antwerp got its glass ship for €55 million, though it holds offices rather than an orchestra.

Visiting

It is an office, so visits go through the port, which has been called Port of Antwerp-Bruges since its merger with Zeebrugge in April 2022. Anyone may look around the ground floor during office hours without booking. For the rest, the port runs guided tours of the Havenhuis on set dates: group tours are listed for 5 November, 1 December, 5 December and 17 December 2026, with individual tickets for the Dutch-language tour on 5 December. The outdoor bridge on the fifth floor, between the two cores, has a 360-degree view over the docks, which are covered in our guide to the Port of Antwerp and its waterways.

Van Mechelen’s drying tower was meant to carry a decorated spire and stopped at about 20 metres. One of Hadid’s concrete supports now stands inside it.