Les cités-jardins en Belgique

Abstract

The question of the reconstruction in Belgium after the First World War wil be done under the influence of Unwin and Berlage, from a planned urbanism in which, the model of Garden-City of renting houses, supported by the powerful Societé Nationale des HBM created in 1919, will rise the entire protagonism in the struggle against the problem of housing. All a new generation of young architects (Bourgeois, Van der Swaelmen ...) linked to the Societé Nationale will get excites about that model in which they wiil see a symbol of progress and a new possible path to La Ville Moderne. They will discard the regionalism and they will assume two tendencies that, with the passing of the time, will become the distinctive feature of the Belgium Garden-Cities in the inter-wars period: 'Cubists' and 'Symplifiers', both trends characterized by the simplicity of the forms, the investigation about the economic construction and their link to the bloom of The Modern Movement.