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there was a great deal of inaccuracy regarding the
distinction between urban planning, regional develop-
ment and urban technique, leading to ‘a confusion
between the map and the region’, and even to certain
planners believing that they alone administered the
space in question. This situation was to change during
the 1960s. It is also important to mention the crisis
that functionalism has experienced over the last few
decades, stemming from doubts regarding its basic
principles. Manfredo Tafuri’s studies of the Italian
Renaissance have revealed that the birth of an idea
or an artistic movement is a precursor to crisis and
decline.
4
The attacks on functionalism came first from
conservatives and academic quarters, then from the
political milieu. But after the Second World War, mod-
ernists themselves started to have doubts and began to
scatter in different directions. This can be seen in the
break-up of the
ciam
(International Congress of Modern
Architecture) during its last meeting in Otterlo in 1959.
The architects began to doubt the uniqueness and
universality of their thinking in the face of cultural and
technical factors, which they had previously consciously
or unconsciously ignored. These doubts gave rise to,
among other things, critical regionalism, research based
on the involvement of citizens in the act of construction
and works incorporating renewable energy.
In the post-war years, training for architects and
engineers was carried out under the leadership of the
master architects of the 1920s and 1930s, influenced
by the nearly mythical memory of their struggle against
academicism. The masters’ emulators then took over,
seeming, for the most part, merely to reproduce what
they had learned. These future architects had little
grounding in engineering and conversely the future engi-
neers had little information about the cultural basis of
architecture. In addition, in Belgium, up until July 2007,
the legal status of an architect was of an independent
who was completely responsible, and who was forbid-
den to get involved with construction, at the risk of los-
ing the right to practise his or her profession. Originally
established with a goal of consumer protection, this
situation was the result of the singular and archaic
concept of the profession libérale, or the self-employed
professional. It is all the more odd given that engineers,
designers and interior designers were almost entirely
exempt from such constraints, and that today all of
these categories carry wide-ranging responsibilities.
This situation might seem irrelevant to this discussion if
it were not for the fact that it forestalled the possibility
of shared research between architecture, industry, busi-
nesses and engineering.
The oil crisis of 1973 changed for a time the economic
basis for construction. Public authorities and architects
slowly came round to the most useful ideas from the
Athens Charter through private real estate development,
miraculously discovering the virtues of working on a
smaller scale, of renovation, rehabilitation and restora-
tion. This shift in thinking lasted only for a short time,
however, as fairly rapidly the pace of the Kondratieff
economic cycles picked up to full speed, as did building
speculation. One sector of architecture experienced a
capricious period under the labels of postmodernism
and deconstructionism. The thrust was to deride, erase,
destroy or even ignore what the modernist movement
had produced, now unfairly judged as responsible for all
social ills. Some practitioners brought to the buildings
issues that had been raised by this movement, particu-
larly for large-scale works, a relatively soft transition,
such as Lucien Kroll was able to do in France. However,
this led above all to the proliferation of small-scale (and
finally larger-scale) urban planning operations that ignored
the simplest rules of regional development and often
proposed works comparable to those of decades past.
It is remarkable that in Belgium, where the virus
seemed to hold sway more than elsewhere, high qual-
ity architecture was still developed, albeit in an almost
underground manner. In Flanders in particular – notably
under the influence of minimalist architecture such as
that practised by Tadao Ando and Alvaro Siza, but also
in the so-called organic structures of the Liège region
– new generations of architects awakened to means of
01-291
Aula Magna,
Louvain-la-Neuve, 1996–1999
01-522
Parliamentary complex,
Tirana, 2007