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In the late 1980s, Philippe Samyn’s architecture
gathered a new momentum, both in its formal
expression and in its ability to take its place in the
surrounding space. In this respect, the project he
submitted for the Banque Bruxelles Lambert com-
petition in 1987
(01-183)
demonstrated a new way
of approaching the urban context. When Gordon
Bunshaft built the Brussels headquarters of the
Banque Lambert in 1959, it was immediately hailed
as a signal event by modernist architects. The
‘Brusselisation’ of the city was already underway,
with the construction of several mixed-use tow-
ers along the capital’s main thoroughfares such
as avenue Louise and the ‘petite ceinture’, not to
mention the tower that supplanted Victor Horta’s
renowned Maison du Peuple in 1965.
The modesty of Bunshaft’s creation showed that one
could design a prestigious building without adding many
floors to it, by giving it structured and generous open
spaces and by handling the construction and design
details, both large and small, with elegance. When the
bank, later known as the Banque Bruxelles Lambert
and then
ing
, organised an architectural competition
to extend its floor space into land it owned behind, to
more than twice that of the original building, Philippe
Samyn proposed a relatively complex solution. It
combined a subtle play of peripheral connecting con-
structions to a vertical building, of which part of the
facade was to be double-skinned, the first in a series
of buildings with this feature to be designed by the
architect. The central building broke with the scale of
the neighbourhood, but in a less radical fashion than the
symmetrical buildings built by Jean-Jules Eggericx and
Raphaël Verwilghen in 1934 on the square de Meeûs.
The radical nature of Philippe Samyn’s proposal and its
novel appearance were nonetheless surprising in a dis-
trict that until then had been entirely built with natural
and artificial stone, and cast concrete. The language of
the project launched a series of gentle and lively con-
nections with the neighbouring volumes, modified by
the central emerging volume, characteristic of Philippe
Samyn’s own constructions. As the cross-section of
the project shows, the overall structure is radical but
not brutal. The anthology explains what became of the
project. Much of the interest of the Banque Bruxelles
Lambert project lies in its appropriation of urban space,
which is richer and more complex than in Samyn’s ear-
lier building in the rue du Marais
(01-057)
. Both these
structures and a series of projects that followed display
a discovery of contextualisation and a structuring of the
space that neither confines it to old-fashioned likeness-
es nor to picturesque modernity. The most common
trap in architecture is indifference to the surroundings.
With the exception of a few basic urban planning rules,
often negotiated with the so-called competent authori-
ties, too many architects drop their creations into urban
and rural spaces like so many
ufo
s.
The two projects that Philippe Samyn proposed in 1988
for the extension of the Solvay chemical research centre
in Neder-over-Heembeek
(01-190)
are also located in
a difficult context: a semi-derelict zone to the north
of the greater Brussels area, alongside the Willebroek
Canal. It is an area with a very old industrial history in
which abandoned and destroyed structures such as the
old coke works at Marly sit cheek by jowl with brand
new buildings and vacant lots. Here, the architect Henri
Montois built laboratories for the Solvay Group in 1965,
consisting of a single structure some fifteen storeys
tall and a group of lower buildings. Philippe Samyn’s
first project added a series of passageways, located in
an elevated atrium, and proposed a regulated interior
climate, which later would become one of the central
concerns of the architect and engineer. The second
project folds back the shape of the first project to form
CHAPTER 3
STRUCTURING SPACE
AND URBAN PLANNING
01-232
Immomills office building,
Brussels, 1989–1996
01-223
ocas
research centre,
Zelzate, 1989
01-373
Fire station, Houten, 1998