Constructed landscapes for collective recreation: Victor Bourgeois's open-air projects in Belgium
(2019) AHRA2019 - Architecture & Collective Life — Location: Dundee (21.November.2019)
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- Abstract
- (en) Victor Bourgeois, architect, urbanist, teacher and founding member of the CIAM, was a key figure in Belgian modernism. However, his work, especially from the ‘30s and the post-war period, has been disregarded by historians and critics of the past decades such as Albert Bontridder, Geert Bekaert or Pierre Puttemans. The architect is considered as influential for his writings and thoughts. But his built work is deemed too dogmatic, displaying an obsession for organization (Puttemans, 1974, p137). More recently, in his PhD thesis, Iwan Strauven has brought some nuance to this discourse by reconnecting Bourgeois’s theory to practice, and pre-war to post-war works. Nevertheless, the leisure-oriented projects studied in this chapter remained neglected by Strauven. Although he briefly addresses a few of them, he presents them as projects where architectural composition didn’t matter and where Bourgeois mainly emphasized the importance of realizing a social program, indicating a shift in the architect’s career, where urbanism took over architecture (Strauven, 2015, p332-333). These considerations will not be denied and the dogmatic aspect of Bourgeois’s work will be discussed in the fourth section. However, they will be momentarily set aside, in order to recompose another narrative from these marginal projects and their cultural and political context. Indeed, highlighting this part of Bourgeois's career constitutes above all an opportunity to explore the construction of a modernist proposition for collective life, in close relationship with the public sector as contractor and rooted in a landscape approach.
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Pirard, M. (2019). Constructed landscapes for collective recreation: Victor Bourgeois’s open-air projects in Belgium. AHRA2019 - Architecture & Collective Life, Dundee. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/169894