The famous Antwerp skyscraper has largely stood quiet and unchanged for almost a century. As it prepares for its 100th birthday and a new future, The Brussels Times dives into the past to uncover the history of this enduring symbol of Flemish prosperity.
Brussels has its Atomium. It also has the Grand Place, the Royal Palace and the Palais du Justice, often proudly grouped together on the postcards and magnets sold in souvenir shops and at the airport, or photoshopped into impossible proximity in a bid to both evoke an entire city in a skyline.
Antwerp, however, has the Boerentoren – the Farmers' Tower.
Illustration picture shows the iconic 'Boerentoren' in the center of Antwerp, Thursday 19 November 2020. Original owner KBC Bank will sell the landmark building, built in 1930 in Art-Deco style, to Katoen Natie Group. The tower will be turned into a 'Culture Tower', with room for shops, offices and homes. The reconstruction and conversion will take some six years. Credit: Belga / Dirk Waem
It’s not just a building – not now, and not when it was first designed in the 1920s. It was always more than a building, back when it existed only in blueprints, or in the dreams and ambitions of turn-of-the-century architects Jan Vanhoenacker, Émile Van Averbeke and Jos Smolderen.
Even as its first stones were laid in the 1930s, as steel scaffolding climbed to heights never before seen in all of Europe, the sense that everyone had of the structure (be they passerby or directly involved in its labour or purpose) was that something more than a mere building was being erected in the crater left behind on Schoenmarkt after World War I.
Rather, the 95.8-metre high tower that eventually rose to cast its long shadow over the once economic capital of the continent was a beacon: of Belgium’s global significance, of Flanders’ regional prosperity, of Antwerp’s undeniable place at the centre of the universe. As the locals say, “Antwerpen is 't stad en de rest is parking” – Antwerp is the city and the rest is parking. The tower boomed.
Even if it weren’t exactly true just yet.
Skyline of Antwerp with the Boerentoren pictured during the oath taking ceremony for some of the new mayors of the Antwerp province, Tuesday 14 January 2025, in Antwerp. Credit: Belga / Dirk Waem
A building as a promise
Antwerp had its Golden Age during the first half of the 16th century and by the time the 20th rolled around, had ceded its position as the beating heart of Belgian’s financial markets to Brussels. At the start of the 1900s, Flanders was seen by many as the rural side of Belgium. The region’s elite took pains to speak French, hoping to distance themselves from this reputation of peasantry, and in no Flemish city did they make so great an effort to do so as in Antwerp.
Yet for all the stuffiness of the bourgeois class, if there is one thing that enduring cities seem to have in common, it is a lean towards progressivism. An open-minded collective mentality backed up by state-sanctioned tolerance for differing perspectives seems to beget innovation in human spaces. What may be more debatable is whether such progressivism is the result of kind hearts or because, as the professional historians of the Geheugen Collectief, Belgium’s first historical research agency, puts it more practically: “Ideological fanaticism is rarely a breeding ground for economic growth and prosperity.”
Regardless of the reason, nearly 400 years after Brueghel painted The Tower of Babel, Antwerp was again poised for growth and prosperity with its mind fully opened to the burgeoning movement that would later be known as Art Deco.
“Each style was once modern in its time,” the architects behind the Farmers’ Tower said in a 1929 interview with Vandaag, defending a project whose plans had already raised a few eyebrows among the city’s more traditional-minded residents.
The Farmers’ Tower was, at the time of its design, the answer to the Antwerp city council’s demand for a modern edifice in the city centre, with a preference for some sort of prestigious headquarters, perhaps. Then-mayor Frans Van Cauwelaert was a devoted student of the Flemish movement (he would go on to help found the newspaper De Standaard, still considered by many to be, well, the standard when it comes to Belgium’s Dutch-language journalism).
He was also young by politician standards, receptive to ideas that were bold and ambitious, and determined to put Antwerp’s best face forward for the upcoming 1930 World’s Fair in the city. By that measure, the undeveloped block at Schoenmarkt-Eiermarkt-Beddenstraat, still wearing its war wounds, presented an opportunity.
A new bank by the name of Algemeene Bankvereeniging (using the old Dutch spelling), in which the professional association of Flemish farmers had a large stake, saw it much the same. Alone in their keen intuition, they were the only bidder on the land and nabbed it for its minimum price of 7,200,000 Belgian francs. The only condition from Van Cauwelaert’s Antwerp was that a “monumental” building be erected on the site.
For a bank as young as Algemeene Bankvereeniging, eager to prove that it deserved its place among the established giants, it was the perfect alignment of priorities. But for two main reasons – that the bank catered to those peasant farmers Flanders was increasingly ashamed of, and that the design for the building was inconceivably modern – they faced an uphill battle.
Is Antwerp really trying to compete with New York and Chicago in the skyscraper movement? Does a modern tower belong in a historic city centre? Won’t such a building humiliate the Antwerp Cathedral? And why this slick, stark style? These were the questions volleyed at the creative minds behind the project, and the architects answered them patiently: no, yes, no, and – using parlance that remains familiar nearly a century later – they asserted that anyone who exclusively favours old forms is a “dinosaur”. The same goes for those who only favour new, they added. Only those who can appreciate both have the right to call themselves modern.
The tower didn’t make the World’s Fair deadline (though fairgoers found the construction work worthy of gawking), but the fact that it took just three years to be completed is stunning considering what was demanded of it: 3,400 tons of steel, 4,700,000 bricks, 3,621 square metres of glass for the windows, and 610,000 screws and rivets combined. There’s a Roger de Villiers statue of the Virgin Mary that’s over two stories tall. Almost 1,400 cubic metres of special limestone was brought in from Burgundy. The Farmers’ Tower was not only a massive architectural undertaking but an artistic one, as well, with friezes and reliefs, caryatids and motifs. Many were symbols of art, architecture, agriculture, trade, science, engineering, prosperity, and shipping; some were designed by Antwerp’s own Arthur Pierre.
Antwerp carved into the building’s very facade what it had once achieved and aimed to be famous for again. Like an act of ritual magic, the structure was built of promises to itself, ambitions and grand designs for the future. The city intended to manifest its destiny in steel and baksteen and, as any Antwerpenaar today will assure you, succeeded.
Algemeene Bankvereeniging moved into the tower, merged into KBC Group in March 2005, and there isn’t all that much to be said of what happened regarding the building in the interim: it reached iconic status immediately after construction and has remained an enduring symbol of Antwerp ever since. The fact that it is still referred to as the Farmers’ Tower, despite its official name of KBC Tower, speaks to its immovable reputation.
In other words, those French-speaking bourgeois were wrong. Both the farmers and their bank prevailed.
A tower for today
In 2020, the Katoen Natie – Indaver group of companies acquired the architectural monument rising above the centre of Antwerp. Its chairman, Fernand Huts, who also holds the title Chairman of The Phoebus Foundation Public Benefit Foundation, has personal ties to the tower.
“When I told my 95-year-old mother that we were going to purchase the Farmers’ Tower, she replied: ‘So there is still justice in the world’,” Huts writes in the foreword to The Farmer’s Tower: Story of an Icon, the multi-authored book which serves as the definitive history of a building that has helped define Antwerp for nearly one hundred years.
Huts’ mother was a farmer’s daughter who grew up during that difficult first half of the 20th century when the economy fell at the same time as the tower rose. Huts reveals that the building’s nickname was an insult at its inception – a moniker applied mockingly amid the economic turmoil farming families in particular were grappling with. Indeed, the few who did not immediately embrace the building as an icon after its construction were the very ones it remains named for.
“These farmers saw the tower, which Antwerpenaars had mockingly named after them, as a painful reminder,” Huts recalls through his mother’s eyes. “They faced desperate times while the bankers looked out over the city and the land from their luxurious building. The nickname that Antwerpenaars had assigned to the country’s very first skyscraper only rubbed salt in the wound.”
But as Antwerp and Flanders grew into the prosperity predicted by the tower, the wound healed. The scar faded. Few today would see the structure as anything other than a symbol of progress and modernity, as intended. After all, before its construction, the only towers in Antwerp were the pagadder towers: tall homes built during prosperous times by the merchant class for the sole purpose of demonstrating their wealth – “bragging rights but with style,” as historians put it. And now here was a tower named for the real economic engine of society, those who worked the earth with their hands, built to house their wealth.
Huts describes the Farmers’ Tower as staunch and unflinching – “proud only as an Antwerpenaar can be,” himself among them. “We are well aware that we have not just acquired a building,” he says, “but a tangible piece of Antwerp’s history.”
He is, of course, also well aware that they’ve acquired a building riddled with asbestos. And a building that has withstood Nazi bombs but also has some stability issues (interestingly, these are mainly recent ones: the upper floors were not part of the initial construction but rather added in the 1970s and aren’t as resilient to storms or heavy winds as the original impressive steel frame).
But the Farmers’ Tower is and always has been a dream for the future, Huts reminds any doubters: “Today, more than anything it seems like a monument that has almost miraculously stood the test of time. But monuments are fragile, and without purpose they fall apart at the seams, literally and figuratively. Our tower, once a lively place bustling with activity, has stood empty in recent years. The giant lay sleeping.”
Not for long. Under the auspices of The Phoebus Foundation, the tower will be transformed into a cultural site featuring exhibitions, gastronomic experiences, and shops. The landmark will become a museum.
“None other than world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind will transform the iconic tower into a veritable cultural tower,” The Phoebus Foundation promises.
“Libeskind's design unites art, functionality, ecology and structure while integrally preserving the original tower. This exceptional project will transform the Boerentoren into a culturally infused place where visitors can enjoy art, architecture, nature and the city.”
Of course, even a landmark as iconic as this is not immune to the rule that history repeats itself. When news broke that the revamp of the Farmers’ Tower entailed demolishing and rebuilding its top three stories, the public reaction was not unlike the one to the building’s initial construction.
Is Antwerp really going to alter such a beloved piece of architecture? Does a historic tower truly need to meet modern structural regulations? Won’t such a major change amount to a defacement of a city symbol? And what if the changes aren’t precisely Art Deco?
The creative minds behind the new vision for the tower offer assurances similar to those of its original architects. Truly modern people are, one may recall, those who appreciate both the old and the new. The only dinosaur welcome at the future Farmers’ Tower is the 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton that will be part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Bolstering these assurances is one piece of undeniable evidence that the tower is resistant to changes that detract from its ultimate purpose: to every Antwerpenaar and even Belgian, it is still the Farmers’ Tower. What the bank named it doesn’t matter one bit. And the entity that owns it now, chaired by the descendant of farmers, seems unlikely to fight a century-old habit. Even such an ‘official’ source as Google Maps will, should you enter ‘KBC Tower’ into its search bar, transport you to an aerial view of that city block labelled Boerentoren. Description? Building. A diminution, for sure – a reductio that ignores the centuries of context and the present significance behind the monument. The Farmers’ Tower has always been and always will be more than just a building.
“Truly great projects are not commonplace,” write the authors of the tower’s history. “They emerge from the foundations of a vision, capital and a sense of glory.”
The Farmers’ Tower stands as a monument to a very special kind of glory – to the glory of a city and the people who continue to build it.
Antwerpen is 't stad. De rest…is parking.
