On the edge of het
Kiel (people in Antwerp always use the preposition for Kiel as the original
village no longer exists and it has become a locality) a new neigbourhood was
developed that was part of an extensive program for (re)development started in
1949 in the wake of WW2. To end the exodus of middle class families to the
surrounding suburbs, the city of Antwerp implements a house building program
targeted at providing large numbers of spacious and healthy accommodation. The
forward-thinking city council advocates modernist principles focussing on a mix
of high-rise, middle-rise and low-rise buildings set in public gardens with
amenities on the basis of the neighbourhood unit of about 1,000 dwellings (back
then equated to 5,500 residents). At that time the city of Antwerp was much
smaller than the present city that includes the surrounding suburbs that used
to be separate municipalities; only Kiel and Oosterweel-Zandvliet fell within
the city limits back then.
West of the Sint-Bernardsesteenweg in Kiel on high
ground edging the polders along the Scheldt river a new development was planned
according to the principles of "New Objectivity". The Antwerp Housing
Corporation (Huisvesting Antwerpen)
has the ambition to create a truly modern new urban quarter on the site in tune
with the latest ideas on urban design and public housing. It is therefore decided
to hire the architect Renaat Braem, who is known as a revolutionary. In a
typical example of Belgian sandwich-politics, Braem is paired with the
socialist architect Viktor Maremans and the catholic architect Hendrik Maes and
commissioned to design a minimum of 650 housing units on the site provided.
The existing urban design with parallel streets meets
with fierce criticism from Braem, who calls it withering repetition, and new
pans are drawn up in line with the CIAM charter of Athens of 1933. To retain a
maximum of free space as ground level he proposes to build high-rises on
pilotis in a green park. Renaat Braem bases his designs on the Unité
d'Habitation in Marseille designed by Le Corbusier. His plan includes some 700
housing units ("cells" in the words of Braem) in 9 blocks of flats
with the addition of a community centre, 5 shops and a communal heating unit.
These plans are finalised in 1950 and the first building phase of 3 high-rises,
the thermal energy plant and the middle-rise V-block with shops starts in 1951.
I 1952 the plans are amended and the community centre is replaced by a housing
complex for the elderly. The high-rises are completed in the second half of
1953 and are fully rented in 1954.
Between 1955 and 1958 the second phase of the project
is built. Two middle-rise V-shaped buildings are built in 9 instead of 8 storeys
raising the total number of housing units to 820. Thus a new neighbourhood is
built consisting of two large-scale urban elements: three high-rises around a
central open space and a row of zigzag middle-rise blocks. The complex made
Braem famous and was much publicised. In 1988 the complex was restored and
refurbished. The Housing Unit Kiel has heritage status and is protected as a
monument of social housing.
The Kiel Housing Unit is loosely based on the
Marseille Housing Unit (1946-'52). The high-rise blocks of the first phase (A,
B and C) were originally intended to be different but were ultimately all built
to the same design to cut costs. The D block with the single storey row of
shops (S) and the thermal energy plant (T) are also part of the first phase of
construction (1951-'55). Building work on the identical block D1 starts in 1955
and is completed in 1956. By this time the construction method is deemed to
inefficient and costly so the other proposed identical block are never built
but instead alternative V-shaped blocks (D2-3 and D4-5) are erected. In this
second phase of construction (1956-'58) the housing complex for the elderly (E)
is also built in a distinctive rounded design that contrasts sharply with the
blocks of flats and the pre-existing terraced houses (hatched).
No comments:
Post a Comment