The joy of rust: clad in a coarse carapace of rusted steel, this housing block is a startling urban presence.

Ever since John Winter audaciously clad his seminal Highgate house in a skin of weathering steel back in 1969, Cor-ten's quasi industrial aesthetic of shipyard and factory floor has become globally ubiquitous. According to Neil Jackson, in his entertaining study of the genre in The Modern Steel House, it took seven years for Winter's little building to slowly acquire the coveted purplish-brown patina of worn-out boiler plating. Now pre-weathered Cor-ten clads the world, from police stations and parking lots to OMA's Las Vegas Guggenheim (June 2002). Yet it never quite loses its quality of otherness, as demonstrated by its use in this recent Brussels apartment block. Here the 'instant' patina of age and distress still provides a bracing shock of the new and unusual amid wedding cake historicism.

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The building lies in Schaerbeek, to the north-east of Brussels city centre, a district populated by many Turkish immigrant families. It occupies a compact, chunky wedge that turns a corner between Avenue de la Reine and Place Liedts. Cars and trams surge past the prow-like site which is anchored between a couple of existing muscular apartment blocks. To the spirit, if not the letter, architect Mario Garzaniti follows the familiar template of the continental walk-up tenement, though the proportions and internal arrangements are more generous and imaginative than might normally be expected. Two duplex apartments are stacked above a shop at ground level, the floors linked by a narrow communal staircase inserted into an intermediate slot between the new and old buildings. Despite being logements sociaux, the duplexes are quite inventive spatially, making the most of the awkward, wedge-shaped plot. The top floor flat even has a modish sleeping loft overlooking the living space below.

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But the most striking aspect of the project is the rusting metal carapace that envelops the building in a coarse caress, as if the hull of an ageing supertanker had somehow careered into the block. Yet the monolithic appearance is slightly deceptive; the Cor-ten panels are only a thin outer skin (a mere 4mm thick) riveted to stainless-steel omega profiles attached to the concrete walls. Flexible bands prevent the risk of galvanic coupling (where one type of metal encourages the rapid corrosion of another) that can occur when Cor-ten and stainless steel come into contact.

Slight disparities in the ochre tones of the panels add a sense of patchwork variety and animation to the overall composition. Cor-ten shutters are incorporated into the facade, filtering light through vertical slits in the manner of a modern mashrabiya. When closed, the shutters lie flush with the panels, giving the block an unsettlingly seamless, hermetic quality.

Clearly this is a building that thrives on contrast (modern Cor-ten and traditional wedding cake) enhanced by the jolting surprise of seeing so visually and culturally challenging a material employed on such an ambitious scale. Yet it is more than just a skin, attested by the generous proportions of the apartments and the way in which light animates the interiors. The gritty boiler plating conceals a sensitive soul. C. S.