A little history...

 An architectural legacy

The Pass site used to be known as Crachet Picquery.
There is evidence that coal was already mined here in the 12th century, entirely by hand.
The mine flourished through the 18th and 19th centuries and into the early 20th. Then the crisis in the coal industry began to make itself felt. After the Second World War, the company invested in completely new equipment, but this could not prevent the mine's closure in 1960.

The industrial architecture of the 1950s, confident in its certainties and its rules, gave the site some spectacular buildings, which were given listed status in 1989. In 1997, on the initiative of the local and regional authorities and with support from the European Community, the former colliery was chosen as the location for Belgium's premier celebration of scientific and technical culture.
The layout of the site and the architectural design were opened to a Europe-wide request for bids, leading to the selection of a French architect with a global reputation, Jean Nouvel.

Nouvel, who has designed prestigious cultural buildings throughout the world, is also passionate about industrial archaeology. He is committed to respecting the history of the sites where he works, creating modern constructions which continue to bear witness to their original functions and periods. This approach has found remarkable expression in the creation of the Pass, whose architecture, simultaneously sober and spartan, expressive and functional, dynamic and poetic, borrows the raw materials of industrial buildings: profiled metal cladding, smooth concrete, arched wooden beams - to deepen its connection with the place.

Jean Nouvel saved several buildings from demolition (the Silo Quarter, at the entrance to the site), and sought inspiration from the colliery's operation to give the site back its initial dimensions, creating a park made up of nine spaces, rich in an architecture that is full of meaning.