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Eero Saarinen’s buildings for Yale University established
the dialogue between modern architecture and the
neo-medieval style that is the trademark of Ivy League
universities. In Belgium, the masters of modernism
seemed happy simply to have survived, and lost their
cutting edge. The 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels was
characterised by the gap that had opened up between
the younger generation and their elders. Almost all of
those individuals who would go on to become the main-
stay of Belgian architecture – Jacques Dupuis, Simone
Guillissen-Hoa, Albert Bontridder, Roger Bastin and
Jacques Wybauw, inspired by the Scandinavian school,
as well as Renaat Braem and Willy Van der Meeren
– were barely present, secondary and minor works not-
withstanding. Only Constantin Brodzki, Robert Courtois
and Lucien Jacques Baucher stood out from a mass of
generally conventional and commercial architecture. The
spectacular Atomium, which dominated the exhibition
site, seemed to prove that if architecture did not interest
anyone, the driving force behind the art of construction
would be engineers not architects. Hence the French
pavilion with Jean Prouvé’s facades and roofs (designed
by Guillaume Gillet) and structures by René Sarger, who
also had a hand in the Marie Thumas pavilion and that
of the city of Paris. The Thumas pavilion was designed
to be temporary and could be dismantled, perhaps later
influencing the temporary offices that Willy Van der
Meeren built in 1965 on a rented site in the Brussels
suburbs. It was clear that, despite the euphoria regard-
ing new structures, of which they were not always the
authors, architects did not appreciate the magnitude of
the task before them. Journals from the period concen-
trated mainly on two themes: urbanism and prefabrica-
tion, as well as the incorporation of plastic materials.
All those who believed that the paleo-technical period
of modernism had come to an end were sorely disap-
pointed and the construction industry remained essen-
tially unchanged. In order to understand this euphoria
and its corresponding illusions, one should recall that by
the 1920s in Europe – starting from the last decade of
the nineteenth century – architecture, like other plastic
arts, had experienced a brutal break with all that had
preceded it. This was true both conceptually as well as
for structural techniques. The enthusiasm for continual
innovation and the ‘setting in order’ of the visual dimen-
sion of the world was precisely articulated by a number
of authors including Maurice Casteels in L’art moderne
primitif.
2
The title alone underscores how, by the 1920s,
architecture had created an entirely new language and
sought to widen its domain and its public.
Specifically, many critics criticised modernist and func-
tionalist architecture for its international, cosmopolitan
character. However, it was hardly the first time that a
style or a mode of architecture had become geographi-
cally widespread. Greco-Roman architecture was found
throughout the classical world, and French Gothic
architecture followed the expansion of power and ter-
ritories before covering practically the entire Christian
world. The Renaissance spread from Italy across almost
all of Europe, and nineteenth-century eclecticism was
transported via the colonisation of Africa and Asia, and
so on. The Canadian historian, Peter Collins, powerfully
argued this and other points in his authoritative work
from 1965, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture
1750–1950,
3
in which he drew attention to the relation-
ship between changes in architectural styles and chang-
es in the ideologies of Western society. At the same
time, it is important to remember that there has been
resistance from conservative quarters and totalitarian
regimes at various periods, mainly to preserve national
traditions where these were not made all of a piece, as
was the case with socialist realism.
The international nature of many contemporary trends is
therefore hardly surprising. ‘Critical regionalism’, which
seeks to adapt architecture to local climates or modes
of socio-political organisation, is not in conflict with the
international nature of architecture. The taste for clean,
uncluttered forms and the sudden emergence of metal
structures in the nineteenth century – as well as the
increasing omnipresence of reinforced concrete – led
to constructions that were as splendid and daring as
they were foolhardy. At the same time, a downturn
Pier Luigi Nervi
Aircraft hangar, Orvieto,
1934–1941
Walter Gropius
Fagus factory,
Alfeld an der Leine, 1911