Belgium is teaming up with the EU to celebrate its 200th birthday in 2030 at the Cinquantenaire Park in Brussels. But can a city park dotted with monuments glorifying an imperial past reflect the inclusive vision of the 21st century?
The short shopping stretch from the Porte de Namur to Place Louise, known as the Toison d’Or, is essentially two distinct sections bisected by a busy highway and tunnels. The city has new plans to make the zone more user-friendly.
Until the 1870s, central Brussels resembled Bruges more than a little, as we can still see from photographs and paintings of the time.
Fun, frivolous and unapologetically decorative, Brussels honours the architectural era that turned design into a daily delight.
While the Brussels traffic still snarls below on the Avenue Louise, the renovated icon promises energy-efficient luxury and a nostalgic nod to its 1960s origins.
Who knows if patriotic pride spurred Belgian modernist architecture in the 1920s?
Stanislas Jasinski designed apartment blocks that still grace Uccle and Ixelles, but his real legacy lies in his far-sighted vision for modern urban dwelling.
Place Royale is the great survivor of Brussels. Its late-18th-century architecture appears to have emerged unscathed from its first quarter millennium of existence.
"Since its birth, Boulevard Anspach has reflected the changing fortunes and tastes of the city, and the downtown ‘Pentagon’ area of 2020s Brussels is not rich. If there are many fast-food joints in the street, it’s perhaps because people like them and it’s what they can afford."
The much-maligned roundabout at the core of the EU Quarter in Brussels is set to be rebuilt once again.
In the 2020s and beyond, centenarian architecture is as likely to have a flat roof and abstract decoration, if any at all, pointing the way to the modernist reimagining of the city’s homes and offices in glass, concrete and stone from the 1950s.
The new glass mammoth stands on the site of not just a car park but before that, a dog track, an ice rink, a ballroom, a covered market, a fish market and the city’s original port on the vanished river.
Many would thrive in the final years of Leopold II’s reign as the proceeds of the Congo empire flooded in, and they were the ideal market for a reinvented mode of city living focused on the picturesque.
Art Nouveau was the brainchild of Belgians like Victor Horta and Paul Hankar who broke with the classical themes weighing down late 19th century architecture. The movement fell out of fashion in the 1950s, brushed away by the brute efficiency of Brusselization.
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