The town hall is really three buildings stitched together. The oldest part is the Schepenhuis, a small Gothic structure from 1374 that was the original aldermen's house and possibly the first stone civic building of the Low Countries; it now usually shows temporary exhibitions. Next door is the Lakenhalle, the unfinished 14th-century cloth hall, with its short stump tower at the corner. The grand façade facing the Grote Markt was begun in 1530 in Brabantine late-Gothic style as a much more ambitious new town hall — also never finished, and only completed in the 20th century in a sympathetic neo-style.
The result is more interesting than a single building would have been: you can read the city's medieval ambitions in the stone, scaled back each time history intervened.