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19
Universitaires Saint-Louis (1967). These are without
a doubt, in all their discretion, the best examples of
post-war construction in this neighbourhood, which has
suffered from a lack of coherent decision-making from
the local administration. The only challenge that could
be tackled concerned urban planning. Philippe Samyn’s
apartment building
(01-057)
extended the line of
banking offices and the headquarters of a construction
company (today taken over by a bank). It overlooked
the final vestiges of the old street, some of which
was still being demolished by pickaxe, that demolition
weapon of choice. The overall structure Philippe Samyn
decided upon enlivens the street with pleated facades,
allowing those inside a view of the street. The contour
modulation (modénature) is discreet and the materi-
als correspond to the light tones of the surroundings.
The double-height ground floor in the centre of the
composition features several windows towards the
rear of a fairly shallow plot of land. When it was built,
it was less common to combine retail and business,
which explains the absence of shops on the ground
floor. In fact, the rue Neuve, a shopping street, lies
nearby. Once might say that with this structure Philippe
Samyn had discovered the city, but under such difficult
conditions, the observation would be thankless. It was
perhaps also not the place to pull out all the stops.
The Design Board offices, in the avenue Georges
Lecointe in Uccle
(01-147)
, are situated in the very dif-
ferent context of an intimate quarter of small detached
and semi-detached homes built between the wars and
shortly after the Second World War. Philippe Samyn’s
creation is a reduction of a much larger project,
described in the anthology. The architect’s work here is
at once expansive and discreet, reserving its variety of
forms and structures for visitors. It is not really possible
to anticipate them from the building’s exterior, as the
architect has taken great care to avoid adding anything
obtrusive to the external environment. Once inside the
building, the treatment of light and its relatively lavish
structure is thus all the more surprising. The atten-
tion paid to the interior/exterior interface, as well as a
certain gentleness in both the lighting and the forms,
would go on to become the principal touchstones of
Philippe Samyn’s oeuvre. For example, in the Boulanger
real estate offices in Waterloo
(01-200)
, designed in
1988, two years after the Design Board project, the
building is dominated by a commanding geometry and
a Gothic (or Byzantine) flowering of skylights set in an
extraordinarily present wooden structure.
At the same time – following on from the unrealised
projects for the Banque Bruxelles Lambert competition
in Brussels
(01-183)
and the extensions to the Solvay
laboratories in Neder-over-Heembeek
(01-190)
– the
double facades of the Brussimmo office building
(01-225)
in the rue de Trèves, Brussels, are proof
of Samyn’s increasing involvement in mastering the
physical characteristics of a structure. He conceived
his structures as complete entities in which – just as
with living organisms – no part is totally autonomous,
and everything interacts with everything else. As for
the double facades, we can see that, apart from their
physical characteristics, Philippe Samyn endeavoured
to avoid them appearing like mirrors, with no depth.
This will be examined further in Chapter 10.
Is this a sort of manifestation of functionalism? We
know that some of the early modernists, out of a
concern for legibility, wanted to assign the various
functions to completely differentiated elements (such
as natural lighting and ventilation of spaces, which Le
Corbusier called ‘exact air’). Today, enhancing such
differentiations is a matter of rigorous research and
answers are hard to come by, particularly in a world
in which saving energy is becoming vitally important.
The time has come, as Lucien Kroll remarked, to seek
out compatibility between materials and construction
techniques, in an unbiased and level headed manner,
while maintaining the consistency of the composition.
5
In an era when such problems seemed to be stated in
less heated terms than today, several renowned archi-
tects turned their attention to the design of complete
organisms, which included all of a building’s physical
01-147
Design Board offices and studio,
Uccle, 1986–1987
01-225
Brussimmo office building,
Brussels, 1989–1991