“Le Monopole du Passéisme”: A Left-Historicist Critique of Late Capitalism in Brussels

During the 1970’s, dissatisfaction with Brussels’ urban development was voiced by a series of counter-projects set up by the Atelier de Recherche et d’Action Urbaines (ARAU), which managed to garner public support and even to prevent some planned projects. The architecture institute La Cambre, which by then had turned towards a socially engaged pedagogy, served as an intellectual breeding ground and as a reservoir of image-producing students. As history was the source of inspiration for ARAU’s counterproposals, the Archives d’Architecture Moderne (AAM) also played a crucial role in their success by generating a fast pace of exhibitions and a steady flow of publications. By the mid-70’s, these three institutions – ARAU, La Cambre and AAM – formed a mutually supporting triumvirate, with Maurice Culot as the pivotal figure, leaving its impact on Brussels.“Nous ne laisserons pas à la droite bourgeoise le monopole du passéisme” – 1977. These words by Culot in the journal of AAM illustrate ARAU’s well-known mobilization of history in their counter-projects (Doucet 2013), but also entail the search for a socialist architecture rooted in their Western condition, as well as a positioning towards architecture in socialist countries. This paper aims to trace this implicit positioning by means of AAM’s (traveling) exhibitions and publishing activities: a 1975 reinterpretation of the Italian Architettura Razionale exhibition, a 1976 discussion between Culot and Léon Krier on the form of socialist architecture and a 1977 episode of interest in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920’s. This paper’s overview reveals how this group from La Cambre looked to the east (often via the south: via editors like Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in Switzerland), recuperating ideas and mobilizing them to legitimize their view on history – one rooted in local tradition and local people – and thus trying to defend a conservative historicist architecture from the left side of the political spectrum.

ISBN:978-3-0356-1017-8

Publication year:2016