Construction Complete on New RTBF Headquarters Média Square in Belgium

BESIX, Valens and In Advance, together JV VALBESINA, recently completed Média Square in Brussels (Belgium), the new headquarters and production company of Belgian Radio and Television of the French Community. The building covers a gross area of 38,000 square meters.

Média Square is equipped with 18 studios, designed to share equipment between the teams, which optimizes resources and accelerates content production. This versatility meant the site teams faced unique structural and acoustic challenges during construction.

“We constructed these studios as completely soundproof units,” said Tom Michiels, project director at BESIX. “Each studio is surrounded by multiple layers of sound-absorbing material and concrete to completely eliminate external vibrations and sounds. Additionally, some studios span multiple floors. To manage these structural challenges during construction, we installed temporary structures until the end of the main construction phase.”

The construction of Média Square leaned on advanced sustainable building techniques, such as concrete core activation. This method exploits the thermal mass of concrete for energy-efficient heating and cooling.

“Normally, installations like ventilation and cabling are processed in the ceiling,” explains Michiels. “But due to the concrete core activation, we had to integrate these elements into a raised floor of 80 centimeters. This is complex, as each new technique could impede the subsequent process. This created a circular construction process requiring constant access to the space beneath the floor, which demanded additional coordination.”

To avoid potential conflicts between technical installations and the structure of the raised floor, an innovative solution was deployed. A BIM printer was used to print the exact locations of the floor supports on the subfloor. This ensured extremely precise placement and prevented issues later in the construction process. Additionally, attention was paid to airtightness, with the team achieving a value of 0.30 Vol/h in the first test, significantly better than the target value of 0.55 Vol/h. In comparison, a passive building is allowed a maximum of 0.60 Vol/h.