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THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A COMMERCIAL/RESIDENTIAL URBAN BLOCK RUE DE LAEKEN, 1989-95 arch. : G. Tagliaventi & Ass., Atelier 55, S. Assassin, B. Dumons, P. Gisclard, N. Prat, J.P. Garric, V. Negre, J. Cenicacelaya, I. Saloña, L. O’Connor, J. Robins, J. Altuna, M.L. Petit arch. coord. Atelier Atlante Up to 1958, Bruxelles was a beautiful city. It had miracously escaped untouched from the II World War ruins and still conserved an extraordinary urban fabric. The city had been capable to assemble through the different centuries several different architectural expressions within a typical urban fabric based upon the small lot organization, which perfectly reflected the distinguished features of a noble commercial and artisanal tradition. This strong and proud city had also succeeded in persuading the imperial governor to reconstruct the Grand Place square like it was before the terrible bombing caused by French troups of Louis XIV in 1693. Since the 1958 Expo and the decision taken almost at that time by the European Community government to definitly establish itself in Bruxelles, a series of extremely huge alterations radically affected the urban environment and broke that weak balance between the socio-economic structure and the urban fabric, which had characterized the urban development of the city through the centuries. Several neighborhoods were rapidly destroyed in order to leave room for glass and steel boxes to come, whose necessity for the EEC was at that time supposed. Many thousands of inhabitants were expelled from the historic center and its neighbors (13.000 only from the Northern urban quarter), while hundreds historic monuments were demolished in favour of the rising of sparse skyscrapers heavily deforming that city silhouette which was so long dominated by the Town Hall Tower and, after the 19th century, by the prominent dome of the Justice Court Palace, both buildings symbolizing the major institutions of the city and the State. Such a destructive process continued during the 60s and 70s either for the construction of chaotically located towers or for the consequences of the Plan Manhattan development, which aimed at constructing about 55 skyscrapers all concentered within the Northern urban quarter’s area. Nevertheless, such a plan was never completely realized thanks to the consequences of the 1973 worldwide crisis as well as the economic difficulties of the promoting companies. The Bruxelles case has thus become a deeply studied example of erroneous urbanistic and economic planning both at the public and private scale. The construction of an overcalculated stock of office buildings which largely trespasses the possibilities for the market to absorb it causes the stop of the construction process on site, leaving entire blocks abandoned that rapidly become true urban cancers or wild parking areas. Several financial companies went into bankrupt for this, but the fact that Bruxelles become so worldwide a famous city did not avoid the large destruction of its urban fabric. That is when a deep process of critical reconsideration of both the urban politics and the global strategy to adopt in order to reconstruct the urban structure in its various aspects - morphological, social, cultural, economical - occurred. Thanks to the activity of cultural associations that were created in the late 60s to fight against the urban ruin process, several alternative proposals were presented in order to demonstrate that the economic development could allow a high-quality urban environment to exist. Thanks to the famous "counter-projects", at the beginning of the 80s, Bruxelles has been able to adopt a completely new urban policy basically oriented towards the use of the traditional European city as a reference. The Archives d’Architecture Moderne (AAM) by Maurice Culot and the Atelier de Recherche et d’Action Urbaine (ARAU) by René Schoonbrodt have progressively forced the various authorities involved in the urban development process to adopt technical and legal instruments capable to begin a true process of urban renaissance by the densification of the residential and commercial network within the degraded areas. As Minister Charles Piqué, the President of the Capital Bruxelles Region, pointed out: "After decades of urban escape and crisis in the quality of life, the new policy taht is developed since 1989 is based upon the idea of urban restoration. The <projet de ville>, which translates the Regional Plan into a local scale, mobilitates all the enrgies towards this rather new goal: finacial resources as well as masterplans and urban codes. It aims at increasing the residential presence within the city through the creation of a safely quality of urban life, the provision of facilities and work places, and seducent urban forms". The results of this new policy brought immediately positive answers to the crisis. Since the end of the 80s and the early 90s, dozens of reconstructions have been undertaken within the historic centre on the vacant areas of the previous barbarous demolitions. The numerous operations of urban reconstruction such as the Laeken street, Place Carrefour de l’Europe, as welle as the Vieille-Halle-aux-Blés and Marché Saint-Géry quarters or the marché au Charbon neighborhood, all represent some of the most important cases of urban renaissance where the new functions - hotels, offices, social housing, etc.- use the architectural features of the European urban tradition. |
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