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The Demise of the Belgian House

The Belgian house was built on a plot of land, a plot

received from one's parents that had previously been
a field or a wood or a meadow. A father would divide
up his meadow, wood or fields into several building
plots for his children; often he would sell off a cou­
ple of plots and give the proceeds as a dowry to his
sons and daughters, thus enabling them to pay for a
large chunk of the house they wanted to build on the
piece of land they had been given. The plot needed to
be big enough, 1000 m2 being considered the absolute
minimum. The house was by preference freestand­
ing: 'at least then you are not bothered by anyone'.
Whatever, a terraced house was the least we were pre­
pared to accept. The economically built Dutch apart­
ment blocks were laughed off as the results of petty
parsimony; we looked pityingly at the German hous­
ing estates and northern French tower blocks: 'They
live in rabbit hutches, in dovecotes, we live in houses'.
44 The Demise of the Belgian House
The Belgian house was built mainly at the weekends
and during the long summer vacation. The house
was screened from neighbours by rows of evergreen
spruces, laurels, pines and cypresses planted along the
property boundary. The law with respect to outlook
and light is no mere planning law in Belgium; Belgians
regard the preservation of privacy as so important and
essential that it was incorporated into the Civil Code.
The house expressed status with orange, brown or
white painted brick, rubble brick and French white
limestone, red roof tiles, or black asbestos cement
slates, wooden, aluminium or plastic window frames,
dormers, porches and bay windows. Behind the house
came the extensions, the annexes, the essence of the
Belgian home. In those annexes chinchilla rabbits
were bred for their fur, cars were dismantled, pigs fat­
tened, there was welding, soldering and wood-turning,
budgerigars and German shepherds were bred and
motorbikes tuned up, all of it illegal. With the money
earned the coveted individuality could be bought,
built, maintained and sanctified.
But now, suddenly, at the end of the millennium, on
the periphery of every Belgian town and in a good
many villages as well, apartment buildings are going
up. They are being built by construction firms, by
social housing corporations, by small-time investors
(the baker or butcher around the corner), by insur­
ance companies. W hen you drive back to that Belgian
house of yours you will see them standing there: at
The Demise of the Belgian House 45
times disguised as oversized villas in which six storeys
have been brought together under gigantic roofs with
plain tiles. They come in every form and style, from
postmodern to neomodern, from stucco to brown
brick. Occasionally they are intended for specific
groups-senior citizens, students, young couples.
How is it possible that we all at once actually want
to live in apartments or lofts, with neighbours above,
below and next to us?
It is because we are no longer Belgians; we have sud­
denly become Europeans. We are no longer Belgians in
the same way as we are no longer Catholic, the switch
from Belgian to European proceeded as rapidly and
apparently easily as the transition from Catholic to
non-Catholic and there is no going back.
How on earth could we live in Belgium any more? We
don't even have the CVP (Christian Social Party) in
the government, we all voted the wrong way last time.
We are no longer prepared to work overtime. We prefer
9 to 5 jobs. At the end of the day we drive home to our
apartment, pop the paella in the microwave or order
a Pizza Margherita. In the evenings we doze in front
of the television. At weekends we go shopping and
visit the Over the Edges exhibition in Ghent. We no
longer spend our holidays painting and sanding eaves
and roller shutters, we no longer stay at home to pave
the 30 m 2 terrace or to mow and water the lawn. As
soon as we get an extra day off we take a charter flight
to Tenerife or Lanzarote; it costs next to nothing,
46 The Demise of the Belgian House
cheaper in fact than staying home. We know that our
marriages don't last long, there is no longer any Church
that might persuade us otherwise. So why should we
continue to build for life, let alone for future genera­
tions? The abstract apartment or the identical studio is
more in tune with the kind of life lived by multi-parent
children, by perpetual students, divorcees, early retir­
ees and senile oldies approaching their century.
Nowadays we keep our status high by driving round
in a people carrier, our illusion of freedom comes from
phoning with our GSM. Under European pressure the
Belgian house is melting as fast as Belgian chocolate.
(Belgian chocolate, that used to be pure and dark.)
All at once we accept that our housing should be stan­
dardized; the freedom, the individuality we for so long
derived from our dwelling we are prepared to give up:
we accept that our dwellings will be subjected first to
insulation standards, then again to ventilation stan­
dards. A while back we would still have said: 'Sir, I'll
do what I want with my money-if I want to heat the
outdoors through single glazing that's my business
and my good right'. We accept minimum room heights
where in the past we crawled wherever it suited us.
It is new for me as architect to have to specify the
different function of the various rooms on building
application plans. On such plans a small room of 80
by 150 cm must be designated 'toilet' or my plans
will be refused. A few years back we still felt that it
was nobody's business but our own where we ate and
The Demise of the Belgian House 47
where we slept. May I still fuck in a space approved
for cooking in? A few years back we still felt that it was
nobody's business but our own where we worked and
where we lived and now all at once we have a Flemish
Structure Plan: someone has decided where we should
live, where we should farm, where we may manufac­
ture, and we accept this. The motives are social, eco­
logical, hygienic and of course logical, always logical,
always economic, always capitalist. And so we end
up in that European intentionality and we lose that
wonderful Belgian individuality, and there is no going
back. Some might think that my argument betrays an
anti-European tendency, that my narrative betrays a
nationalist bias, but Belgium has always been more of
a condition than a nation.
Marc Dutroux was an exponent of the Belgian con­
dition, he was also the proof of the beginning of the
end of that Belgian condition. Your own house, and by
that I mean the house itself and the land around it, is
yours to do with what you want; you can murder and
bury whoever you want there. Neighbours obviously
have no idea what you are up to and wouldn't want
to know: privacy is sacred and comes before all else.
The state, the collective, is only there to cheat you, to
profit from you, to bleed you dry, not to be trusted,
not to be counted on, not to be allowed to build.
Flemish politician Steve Stevaert was the inquisi­
tor of the Belgian condition. From his television pul­
pit he fulminated against the Belgian way of doing
48 The Demise of the Belgian House
things. Belgians watched in amazement as Stevaert
had all kinds of illegal structures demolished and,
oddly enough, this attack on the deepest inner self of
the Belgian resulted not in a popular uprising but in
universal acquiescence: we didn't think it would hap­
pen to us. After all, you can't add anything illegal to
a small flat and besides, why would you? ... all that
bother.
Lucien and Jan Verkest were wealthy fools from the
early post-Belgian period: the origins of the dioxin
crisis lay in the acceptance of the principle of separat­
ing rubbish. Before that we cleared up our own rub­
bish: we burned it in the rusty drum behind the shed,
now we dump all the garbage, however nasty, in green
(collective) wheelie bins and rely on the collective to
clear it away, to treat and recycle it. Of course, we are
completely lacking in any tradition of doing this with
the necessary care. Both the individual (the one who
dumps turpentine along with the chip fat into the
bin), and the collective (the state and its organiza­
tions that look after the recycling of the sludge) fail.
But the dioxin crisis made painfully clear that, under
the European condition, if we want to export our food
or elements of it to France, Germany or wherever, it
must meet the standards in force there. Strangely
enough, acceptance of their standards regarding
food turned out to imply the simultaneous extension
of their standards to our housing, or in other words,
there was one big exchange: if they're prepared to eat
The Demise of the Belgian House 49
our food, we're prepared to live in their hutches.
Before, when the primacy of the Belgian house was
still a universal condition, there was but one prece­
dent, but one place where Belgians had been prepared
to live in apartments, and that was the Belgian coast.
There Belgians abandoned their unbridled desire for
individuality and were prepared to endure monstrous
tailbacks in order to spend their leisure time and holi­
days in identical stacked spaces, to consume the same
(panoramic) sea vista. Here two essential notions come
to the fore: leisure on the one hand and panorama on
the other. Leisure denotes lack of commitment, relax­
ation, non-engagement. It is no accident that the pan­
orama, the panoramic view is linked to leisure.
The panoramic view is the opposite of the focusing,
focalizing view. And to my mind that is what architec­
ture is about: architecture (and if not architecture in
general, then at least my architecture) is concerned
with providing outlooks (making holes in walls, deter­
mining what people will look at while they are eat­
ing, while they are talking, while they are living). I
believe that what people end up thinking is the prod­
uct of what they observe, what they see: outlooks gen­
erate insights. The panoramic view is detached, never
shocking, is relaxing, never confrontational, so it is no
accident that Belgians should seek out the panorama
in their leisure time. The panoramic gaze is the oppo­
site of the focalizing gaze. It is my contention that
the focalizing gaze was inherent in the Belgian house.
50 The Demise of the Belgian House The Demise of the Belgian House 51
The exaggerated craving for individuality and the ris­ rooms such that the interior space attacks the inno­
ible dimensions of the territories people used to sat­ cence, the detachment of the magnificent landscape,
isfy that craving had ensured that in Belgium, except but I am quite well aware that this will never result in
along the coast, there was no unappropriated, unde­ Belgian houses, I realize that it is no longer possible to
veloped landscape left. From the vantage point of be a Belgian architect.
every Belgian house the overemphasis on individual­
ity, the screening out of all others, resulted precisely
in a confrontation with those others. The views of the
illogical, the surrealistic, the hypocritical, of explicit
fronts and explicit backs, the views of blind walls
awaiting further development, of concrete enclosures
or evergreen hedges, of high wire fences, constituted
an exceptional condition within which architects had
to work, a condition unique to Belgium. Artists like
Rene Magritte, Marcel Broodthaerts, perhaps even
the likes of Guillaume Bijl, had already explored this
situation and it had afforded them insights they could
not have acquired anywhere else, yet it had never
resulted in 'heimat' art.
However much one may regret it, that (Belgian) con­
dition is a thing of the past. Yet to experience that loss
in Belgium has proven to be unbearable. I have decided
to move to France in two months' time. The panorama
there is magnificent; the only possible action remain­
ing to me as architect is to use the rooms I intend to
design there to achieve a precise, constricting framing
of that panorama. I want the room, the frame from
which one looks out at the landscape, to reveal the dis­
engaged nature of the landscape. I shall try to design