About the Hergé Museum

“Louvain La Neuve is built on a base of parking lots, and the slab that supports it is free-form. I immediately thought it would be interesting not to attach the museum to the city, but to move slightly away from it, closer to the woods. The result is a kind of footbridge that cantilevers over the track, giving the whole structure the appearance of a ship moored there. Rather like Fitzcarraldo’s great ship through the Amazon rainforest.

It’s this “detachment”, this “extra-territoriality”, that gives the ensemble a sense of levitation. It also allowed me to play with the oak wood, which can be seen through the large windows, cut slightly irregularly, like a comic strip.
I wanted the spaces to be penetrated by the narrative, a kind of mental labyrinth, in keeping with Hergé’s universe. From the footbridges, the point of view changes constantly, and the vision of this great luminous void that unites the five spaces gives a good measure of the universality, complexity and richness of the world of the great artist that Hergé was and remains.

“Designing a museum is a long, long process, in which the smallest detail requires vigilance and exacting standards. Some things are more important than others. In the end, it’s all the little and big things that make a good museum.

The architecture forced the team to think of solutions to problems we faced that don’t usually arise in museums. For example, we had a series of frames that couldn’t be fixed to the walls because the walls aren’t vertical. So we chose to display them on easels, creating a kind of orchestra of drawings, something we’d never have imagined without this building. The problems we encountered demanded a great deal of creativity, and I’m very pleased with the result.”

The Hergé sculpture next to the Museum was created by artist Tom Frantzen. It was inaugurated on May 22, 2019.

Tom Frantzen studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, where he completed a degree in monumental sculpture. Deeply rooted in Brussels, he describes himself as a contemporary Flemish fantasy artist. His public works are an interactive part of this culture, enlivening the existing environment in Brussels and elsewhere.