In the new season of Winter Wednesday lectures, the focus will be on the relationships of architects and contractors in the sector of private housing, and how we must look at this as heritage today.
During the 20th century, architects always searched ways to have their housing projects built. The legalization of the profession of architect of 1939, changed the way of building, as it led to the separation of the two professions which could not be executed by the same person. Although, through history, we see different legal constructions invented by architects and contractors to facilitate the realization of private housing projects in the booming postwar city landscape. Lectures will shed light on the different aspects of those collaborations, through the experience of building commissions in London by the Peabody Trust, and in Belgium by architects such as Stanislas Jasinski or Josse Franssen, the housing strategies by Etrimo, and how these collaborations were facilitated by the communal urban planning.
more info29/1/25 KU Leuven
“The in-house housing architect: Builder of buildings or manager of maintenance?”
Recent architectural discourses have called for practices of care, but architects and builders do not often have the mandate to care about wear and tear. This talk reveals how alternative arrangements between architect, builder, and client have instead linked production and maintenance. It focuses on The Peabody Trust, an affordable housing provider existing in London since 1862. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it established recurring roles for architects and builders, making building part of a continuous act of maintenance. However, this sustainable model ironically collapsed towards the 21st century, as the Trust embarked on ecological design – contracting work to external parties who had a limited ability to care about what was built after delivering a project.
19/2/25, ULB/VUB
"The invisible city of Etrimo and Amelinckx: Belgian housing developers and the role of commodified housing in the formation of twentieth-century Belgian metropolis"
This research examines the historical significance of mass-produced apartment buildings in Belgium, challenging the negative perception of post-war mass housing architecture, which is often dismissed as lacking architectural ambitions or as an erosion of early twentieth-century modernist ideals. It investigates the production and activities of the two largest twentieth-century Belgian developers, Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo) and François Amelinckx (Amelinckx N.V.), who realised together over 70,000 apartments in the metropolitan agglomerations of Belgium between 1924 and 1985. Their short-lived, but large-scale, production defines an ‘invisible city’ of which very little was known and was not aligned with the historically anti-urban Belgian housing policies. By exploring the interplay between the enabling conditions offered by society and the development practices of Etrimo and Amelinckx, this research assesses the hypothesis that society ‘gets the kind of project development it enables,’ shaped by the incentives and policies it facilitates. A perspective which has been little-applied in the Belgian case, and is particularly pertinent for interpreting development patterns in a context like Belgium that lacks a strong planning culture.
Arguing that the production of Amelinckx and Etrimo is as the result of the ‘space’ given to developers and the ‘space’ they actively try to claim for their development practices, this invisible city acts as a lens to understand the urban, architectural, economic, and political conditions in which it was realised, offering insights in the selection of the dominant model of project development in Belgium and the role of housing developers in the commodification and housing of a world under urbanisation.
12/3/25, ULB
“Stanislas Jasinski and Josse Franssen: From associated architects to building companies.”
This lecture focuses on the cases of the architects Stanislas Jasinski and Josse Franssen, architects on which DOCOMOMO published and will publish in the book series ‘Parcours d’architecte’. It reveals how their practice was imbedded with the strong aspiration to build a better city in a liberal context. Through their associations with building companies, the lecture will shed light on the focus of the development of private upper class to middle class apartments, through the years of structural growth of the Brussels region. This development was for the architects as much a research on the plan of the ideal apartment and the ways of community living in post-war Brussels, as the implementation of high density at strategic plots on an urbanistic scale. Collaborating with building companies, they were able to construct projects that would not have been possible without this association, or by creating a real estate company. Through several built projects, the influence on the practice of the architects with the building and real estate companies will be questioned.
26/3/25, UGent
“The esthetics of urbanisation. A relational practice.”
This lecture recollects the activities of a study committee (SCAA) that was in charge of urbanizing the Antwerp Agglomeration between 1907 and 1939. Remarkably, the SCAA always refused to develop a master plan for the Antwerp region. The committee firmly rejected the certainties and precisions of a model or a plan in favour of an indeterminate future, the contours of which only gradually emerged as collective action on several pertinent urban questions developed. The questions around which the SCAA developed collective agency included the demand for better roads, sewers, railroads, public transportation, amenities, housing, but also the search for an appropriate aesthetic imagination. Initially, this aesthetic question was submitted to international urban planning experts through an International Competition for the Urban Reconversion of Antwerp’s military Ramparts. As soon as the competition ended and the master urbanists had returned home, however, a young generation of Antwerp architects referring to themselves as the young watchmen, appropriated the aesthetic question. Not from the abstract order of urban planning, but from the near order of architectural practice. Acting as spatial agents rather than as liberal artists these young watchmen developed architectural responses that subscribed to the logics of the urbanization project that the SCAA directed on a larger scale with numerous other actors, such as real estate developers, general contractors, policy makers, publicists, etc. It was in practice, that these architects managed to provide the urbanization process with different, complementary, and internally coherent imaginaries. This story thus aims to contribute to demonstrating that there is a whole range of positions between the rhetorical stances that historically played “the city scientific” against “the city beautiful”; that played the positions of grand regional design against the petty architectural focus on the building; that artificially divided the modernist movement by radically opposing the progressist to the culturalist; that played the lived reality of urban life against the abstractions of planning, etc.