The imagined community of Etrimo. Birth and development of owner-occupied apartment buildings in Brussels
(2021) Optimistic Suburbia. Middle-Class Mass Housing Complexes — Location: Lisbon (16.June.2021)
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- Abstract
- We propose to question the capacity of collective housing to build and support an inhabitants’ community, based on the apartment buildings built in Brussels by the company Etrimo between 1950 and 1970. Taking advantage of the poor state of the existing housing stock and the return of Belgian families from the Congo, the company ETRIMO is intensifying its production of apartment buildings for the middle classes wishing to become homeowners. The buildings consist of the repetition of a single three-room dwelling offering all modern comforts to the nuclear family of the Trente Glorieuses. The portrait of this family, which is reflected in the various commercial brochures and the 14,000 or so homes built in Brussels by the company ETRIMO, suggests a relatively homogeneous middle class. Neither the evolution of the family over time nor its diversification are envisaged. Nor is the collective dimension of a community of inhabitants imagined to originate in the repetition of the typical family in each operation. However, the attention paid to the collective spaces of the complexes, the planted park, the spacious and luminous entrance hall and stairwells, the concierge's office, the collective drying room in the attic... suggests that this community could be effectively put into space. How then did this imagined and abstract community materialise? From the 1970s onwards, the renewal and diversification of the population gradually modified this more or less imagined community and with it the good image of the Etrimo ensembles (also damaged by an energy deficiency, the obsolescence of the materials and a social stigmatisation). Thus, we can ask ourselves to what extent do the collective spaces created allow today to re-invest and support another idea of the community? First, we will present how the juxtaposition of identical households may or may not have produced a homogenous community, and how it was put into place at the different spatial scales of the project, based on the primary sources at our disposal: sales brochures, advertising posters from the company Etrimo, writings by Jean-François Collin on the legal and financial set-up of his business, plans of the housing units and complexes. Then, on the basis of interviews with the inhabitants and in situ observations of living practices in the collective spaces of the housing estates, we will highlight the potential of the ETRIMO housing estates for new ways of living together. Highlighting this potential should provide keys for the (spatial and social) requalification of these paradigmatic buildings in order to meet the challenges of contemporary housing.
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Courbebaisse, A., & Ledent, G. (2021). The imagined community of Etrimo. Birth and development of owner-occupied apartment buildings in Brussels. Optimistic Suburbia. Middle-Class Mass Housing Complexes, Lisbon. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/165649