Vision through building

Showing old and new projects from first draft via scale model to final plan, Bozar offers a trip into the mind of bOb van Reeth (1943), one of the most important post-war Belgian architects. His designs were often controversial, as some old television footage proves in this exhibition, but were embedded in a broader perspective on city planning.

Most consider van Reeth (pictured) a pragmatic architect; he takes it as a compliment. “Today everybody wants to make icons, which is ridiculous. It’s only worth it when it concerns us all. But making every bank building or housing unit an icon is the most foolish thing you can do.” Van Reeth did it once with the Van Roosmalen House (1985-1988), a black-and-white Antwerp landmark at the quay of the river Scheldt. Back then there was no architectural or urban vision for what would become one of Antwerp’s most expensive residential areas.

“Luckily this exploit helped the area fulfil its potential,” van Reeth says. “But that’s not the role of architecture or one striking building. This should be the main goal of policy and city planning.”

Through making new choices, van Reeth helped to change our landscape. As the first appointed Flemish government architect from 1999 to 2005, he laid the foundations of our urban architectural policy. “Though my position came from the higher authorities, we were very lucky in the beginning as local governments also asked for advice when building sports halls, libraries and so on. That made our choices visible.”

It all could have turned out so differently if one day during his teens he hadn’t been in the car with his older brother, driving by the high-rise apartment blocks of architect Renaat Braem in the working-class Antwerp neighbourhood of Kiel. “After bad results at school I had to leave the Jesuit college and my brother, a lawyer, was asking what was going to become of me. ‘When are you finally going to do something serious, other than basketball and tennis?’

“We were driving past these blocks and I said: ‘I want to make high-rise buildings.’ ‘Then you should become an architect,’ he said. “I always wondered what would have become of me if we had driven past a fritkot (laughs)… maybe rich.”

Intelligent ruins

At the Sint-Lukas art school in Brussels, it appeared that van Reeth was a good student after all, thanks to the sheer enthusiasm of his teachers. “It was the most wonderful time,” he says. “The music teacher talked about paintings, the film teacher about music, the maths teacher about literature. Architecture I would only learn about later during higher education, but then I really dived into architectural history.”

During his long career, sustainability – not the catch-all word it has become today – was always an important goal. “But I was not the first,” says van Reeth, putting this eagerness “to build for eternity” into its historical context. “In the Renaissance era, architects who were not building with eternity in mind were not taken seriously. I always attempted to build intelligent ruins and not to fossilise iron. Plans should have the generosity and the maturity to be flexible, meaning that as an urban planner and as an architect you have to distinguish five layers with a different lifespan.”

The urban footprint of our cities is almost eternal, he explains. You cannot change it, unless you are as smart as the French civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the man responsible for rebuilding Paris in the mid-1800s. The structure of a building and its facades should have a lifespan of 400 years. The other layers have a much shorter lifespan: the installations (30 years), the use of the space (10 to 15 years), and the overhaul of the buildings ( five years). This allows buildings to survive long term.

Pick up the values

Asked for examples, he puts forward two of his most recent projects: Kazerne Dossin (2006-2012), Mechelen’s new Holocaust museum, and his extension and renovation of the Trappist Sint-Sixtus Abbey in Westvleteren, West Flanders (2005-2012). “For starters, I didn’t have to convince the brothers of the abbey to build something for eternity! On the other hand, I didn’t have to invent something: Since the 12th century there’s been a fixed typology for every Cistercian monastery.”

Van Reeth revamped the old church of the abbey with a new floor, a refectory on the ground level and a library on the upper floor: very simple and basic, in brick. “The ornament of the building is the silence and the light,” he says. “So the message was basically: Don’t intrude. As an architect you have to pick up the values of the building.”

The same was true for the Holocaust museum, a totally new construction that had to make visible what had been hidden away for more than 60 years. The original barracks had been converted into luxury apartments. Though as a result van Reeth couldn’t use this space, the idea of a hidden history became the starting point for the design, using the old detention building, which was still state-owned, as a building site. “Unlike most other buildings, this one had to be an icon,” he says. “Because it concerns us all.”

The architect was unpleasantly surprised recently by the plans of the Brussels authorities to tear down the King Baudouin Stadium, which he renovated in the mid-1990s. It’s not just capital waste, he claims, but worse: “Giving up the athletics track, the charm of the stadium, would be a real disgrace for the original architect. I think it’s an alibi for property development, which is something completely different from city development. But politicians seem to sometimes mix the two up.”

Until 8 September

bOb van Reeth: Architect

Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussels
www.bozar.be

Tangible inspiration

Before I visit the exhibition, van Reeth warns me: “It’s not a real retrospective. If so, there would have been 700 designs.” Curators Christophe Van Gerrewey, Bart Verschaffel and Birgit Cleppe chose only 67 projects, to make it more manageable. All major projects were included, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they get more space than lesser-known buildings. For every Kazerne Dossin or Van Roosmalen House there’s a house, garden pavilion or office block that characterises his approach just as well.

“They asked if they could dive into my archives,” says van Reeth. “They stayed there for a whole year taking whatever they thought they needed, be it a sketch or a finalised plan. I had no say in their choice, so for me too it’s a surprise to see stuff that otherwise would never have left the archive.” He considers the exhibition a search, focusing on how a draft on a piece of paper becomes a drawing and a drawing ultimately becomes a design and a building – or not.

The curators also show a fascination for unbuilt projects, as they are more revealing about the risks van Reeth was willing to take. Take his prize-winning entry for Ostend’s casino, 20 years ago now. Walking through the exhibition we meet by coincidence the architect himself. He’s watching an old, rather critical interview about this “megalomaniac” project that would have given Ostend the allure of a real seaside city, with a 90m tower on an artificial peninsula. “Bad timing,” he grimaces. “The political world was not ready, elections were too close.”

What van Reeth did was take the urban planning of Leopold II, the last person to really leave his mark on Ostend, to a higher level. Years later this sort of architecture was done by dozens of others with less vision. “Hopefully time will enlarge our minds,” we hear him say to the interviewer, countering her criticism with arguments, patience and a bit of arrogance: typical for this headstrong Antwerp native.

The curators emphasise how ideas grow, how inspiration becomes tangible. “It always starts with tinkering, and sketches on a napkin, from which point an idea can start to grow,” van Reeth explains. To witness this process of creativity is a real pleasure. We get his projects in reverse chronological order, starting with his most recent projects and finishing off with his first renovation project and an unbuilt student draft.

Most enchanting of all is a short documentary about the playground van Reeth created in 1975 in a working-class quarter in Mechelen. We see housewives in old-fashioned aprons praising the multifunctional playground, pigeon fanciers playing cards and little kids being little kids. All manifestly pointing out the architect’s main device: Architecture doesn’t have to be iconic. Above all, it has to be social.