In a district famous for engineering, the Maison des Sciences Humaines makes space for the questions that numbers alone cannot answer. The building brings together work in fields such as history, languages, literature, geography, sociology and education, with offices and seminar spaces arranged around the life of the university’s human sciences community.
It is also closely associated with research into contemporary and digital history. The architecture keeps the ground level visually open, giving a lighter public edge to a serious working building. There may be no blast-furnace platform to climb here, but the perspective matters just as much. Belval’s future needs people who understand societies as well as systems.
