Architecture and the Ideology of Productivity. Four Public Housing Projects by Groupe Structures in Brussels (1950-1965)

Despite our taste for geniuses and landmark buildings, the bulk of the built environment of the postwar world has been designed by unidentified architecture firms that produce buildings rather than discourse. Belgium forms no exception to this rule. Its landscapes are littered with constructions that testify to a mentality that values pragmatism and common sense more than inspired commitment or long-term vision. This is especially true in the field of public housing. However, this does not mean that it is of no interest to the scholar of the postwar period. Quite the contrary: the public housing sector formed the backdrop par excellence for two crucial phenomena in the shaping of the welfare state in Belgium: first, the compartmentalization along socio-political lines of any aspect of society in the course of the 1950s, including housing and town planning; second, the adaptation of the Belgian industry to the economic conditions of the postwar world, necessitating a profound renewal of the country’s outdated manufacturing apparatus. This was especially true for the building trade. Whereas the cultural aspects of the housing problem have been well studied during the last decade – notably the ideological dimension of the discourse on housing – research on the impact of the technical and economic constraints on its production remains scarce.[1] This paper looks into a couple of public housing estates by Groupe Structures. The largest architectural firm in Belgium at its peak, it played a central role in the transformation of Brussels into a tertiary centre in the 1960s. As it will be argued, the stylistic and typological evolution in these schemes – evolving from traditionalist interpretations of the ‘garden city’ concept to straightforward applications of the CIAM doctrine – reveals the growing impact of a ‘productivist ideology’ on the public housing sector in Belgium in the course of the 1950s. Paralyzed by the steeply rising cost of land, labour and building materials, the central buzzwords in the discourse became standardization, industrialization and prefabrication. However, as we will argue, the productivist doctrine failed to live up to its expectations as the public housing sector’s turnover remained too marginal to put sufficient pressure on the construction industry in the adaptation of more rational methods of production and construction.

Publication year:2012

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