The public body that built Belval.
Created by law in 2002 to construct the Cité des Sciences, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation on the old steelworks, it is the client behind almost every public building here: the Maison du Savoir, the Maison des Sciences Humaines, the Maison du Nombre, the Maison des Matériaux, the biotech building, the Rockhal, the Lycée Bel-Val, the national archives, and the restoration of the blast furnaces themselves.
One detail explains a great deal about how this quartier came to look the way it does. Unlike a private developer, the Fonds Belval cannot simply decide to build something. Every single building requires its own act of parliament. The Maison du Savoir has a law behind it. So does the lycée. So does each test hall.
That is why Belval has architecture competitions rather than whatever was cheapest, and why the buildings are more varied and more considered than a single developer would have produced. It is slower, and you can see the difference.
Since 2015 the remit has grown beyond building to running things: managing, maintaining and operating what it put up. Which is why the Fonds is also the organisation that takes you up the blast furnace on a Sunday afternoon.
It is directed by the architect Daniela Di Santo, and it works alongside AGORA, which handles the urban planning and the private side of the site.
