The exhibition Soft Power – The Brussels Way of Making the City traces Belgium’s journey to becoming an internationally renowned hotspot for contemporary architecture and urban planning. The show sheds light on the framework conditions that have given rise to a high-quality building culture in Brussels and encouraged a new generation of architects to participate in its urban development.

The Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA), which was founded in 2009, has made a significant contribution to this, despite being an institution with a purely advisory function. Through it, the city architect and his team have developed a range of tools aimed at supporting clients throughout the entire project process, from its definition to its realization. Competitions are the BMA’s most important instrument: they enable a transparent opening of the markets for architecture, urban planning or public space and contribute to the quality of the projects and thus ultimately the city.

The non-anonymized and internationally tendered ‘calls’ are conceived as a hybrid between open and invited competitions – a format to be considered more frequently in Switzerland?