Face of Flanders — Renaat Braem

In practically every city and town in Flanders, you can find the stamp of Belgium’s leading post-war architect

Before he died in 2001, Renaat Braem had designed or co-designed more than 50 houses and buildings, every one of them in Brussels or Flanders. Many people, in fact, continue to live in his housing projects, which put him in the international architectural spotlight in post-Second World War Europe.

Braem was the only Belgian ever to work as an assistant to the great Swiss architect Le Corbusier, a pioneer in modern architecture who imparted a life-long tendency towards constructivism in his Belgian student. This is easiest to see in Braem’s many 1950s and 60s buildings dotted across the Antwerp landscape, including the famously unpopular 15-storey Politietoren (Police Tower), looking like a steel wafer shooting up into the sky. Altogether different are the white arches of his pavilion in the city’s Middelheim Museum. Both buildings are now protected monuments.

Slightly south of Antwerp, though, is where the city is focusing a competition based on Braem’s possibly most controversial work – a gigantic social housing project in the Kiel district. Architects are invited to submit proposals on how to update and re-use the director’s house and boiler house at the site in order to “demonstrate the value of Braem’s architectural archives as a source of solutions to complex spatial problems.”

The winner and results of the contest will be announced next year, the centenary of Braem’s birth. To mark the occasion, there will also be a major exhibition at deSingel and a number of other activities, including an architectural route and the publication of a series of postcards of Braem’s work.

Braem, in fact, built huge apartment buildings all across Flanders, some more inspired than others, but his administrative buildings tend to integrate art and architecture with a touch more visual aesthetics. The rectorate on the campus of the Free University of Brussels (VUB), for instance, has no sides or corners; it’s a perfect ellipse, its entrance protected by a canopy that swoops up skyward like a great, big eyelash.

That landmark 1970s building should make it onto a postcard, as hopefully will part of its interior: Braem painted murals on every floor and used spiral staircases, whose wood steps contrast magically with brightly coloured railings.

The Renaat Braem House in Deurne is open to the public by appointment

www.vioe.be

Lisa Bradshaw

(November 4, 2009)