Renaat Braem (1910–2001) — Biography & Facts

Renaat Braem: Belgium's Angriest Modernist

Walk into one of the nine blocks at Kiel, in south Antwerp, and the service pipes are on show — and painted. Red for hot water, blue for cold, yellow for return, green for electricity. It is a small decision and a completely characteristic one: rather than hide the plumbing of a social housing estate, Renaat Braem colour-coded it into ornament, on the theory that working people were owed both the honesty and the beauty. He built 780 flats on that principle between 1949 and 1958, and then spent the rest of his life furious that the rest of his country had not bothered.

The Prize That Bought Paris

Braem was an Antwerp man, born there on 29 August 1910, and he trained at the city's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating as an architect in 1935. In the same year he won the biannual Prix Godecharle for a constructivism-inspired design for a linear city strung between Antwerp and Liège — a student project of colossal ambition that already contained the two commitments of his career: large-scale planning, and the conviction that the whole of Belgium was a legitimate design problem.

He spent the prize money on the only apprenticeship that mattered to him, working in Le Corbusier's Paris studio through 1936 and 1937. He is generally identified as the only Belgian architect to have worked in that atelier. In 1937 he joined the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, placing himself formally inside the international movement while remaining, stubbornly, a provincial Fleming.

Kiel: Le Corbusier in Flemish

By the early 1950s Braem was among the most prominent architects in Belgium, and Antwerp's city council handed him two commissions that would define him. The first was the Kiel social housing scheme, built across five hectares in two campaigns: three twelve-storey blocks around a central playground between 1949 and 1953, then six eight-storey blocks between 1955 and 1958, delivered at a cost around twenty per cent lower and introducing duplex apartments with terraces. Roughly 780 dwellings in all. Antwerpers call them the Braemblokken.

The Corbusian vocabulary is unmistakable — pilotis lifting the slabs so the ground could stay open and public — but the intelligence is Braem's own. He set the access galleries half a metre clear of the façades so they read as genuine streets in the air rather than corridors. He rotated the blocks in a zigzag so that every façade faced south-east or south-west and no flat was condemned to permanent shade. He put sculpture by Mark Macken and Albert Poels in the entrance halls. Housing the poor, on this reading, is not a logistics problem with an aesthetic afterthought; it is architecture, and the same standard applies.

The scheme became a landmark in the history of Belgian social housing. It was comprehensively renovated in 1988 and remains inhabited.

The Building That Was Never Finished

The second Antwerp commission went less well. Braem's Administrative Centre for the city was only ever partly built; what stands ended up as the Police Tower headquarters. It is the emblematic frustration of his career — a total vision, executed as a fragment, absorbed by an institution he had not designed it for.

He kept working regardless, across Leuven, Brussels, Deurne and Boom, on housing complexes, private houses and public buildings. From the late 1960s the work loosened: the early strictness gave way to something less rigid and more organic, curved and sculptural where the 1950s buildings had been rectilinear.

Menegemlei 23

In 1955 he built himself a house at Menegemlei 23 in Antwerp. In 1999 he bequeathed it to the Flemish Community — not just the building, but the archives, the library and the furnishings, everything as he had arranged it. It opened as a museum, only the second architect's house in Belgium to be preserved in that form after Victor Horta's in Brussels. The gesture is telling. Braem wanted the evidence kept; he wanted future Belgians to be able to check what he had said.

The Ugliest Country in the World

In 1968 he published the essay that made him a public figure beyond the profession: *Het lelijkste land ter wereld* — "the ugliest country in the world." The target was Belgium's post-war planning, or the absence of it. Reconstruction policy had handed the initiative to private parties, above all to individual families building individual houses wherever they liked, and Braem read the resulting sprawl as a national disorder with ecological consequences. He did not simply complain; the pamphlet proposes concrete actions to raise spatial quality and reverse the ribbon development eating the countryside.

He was ignored in the way that accurate critics usually are. Fifty years later the Flanders Architecture Institute reissued the book, with photographs by Filip Dujardin demonstrating that Belgium still holds the title, a lecture by the architect Leo Van Broeck, and a stage adaptation by Dimitri Leue. He had also founded or helped found the magazines *Plan*, *Architecture* and *Bouwen en Wonen*, and helped establish Antwerp's Bouwcentrum. In 1987 he published his memoirs under the inverted title *Het schoonste land ter wereld* — the most beautiful country in the world.

Why Renaat Is Called a Genius

Braem is a regional figure, and the honest starting point is to say so: he is enormously important in Flanders and largely unknown outside Belgium, and no account of him should pretend otherwise. He did not invent the language he worked in — he learned it from Le Corbusier, and the debt is visible on every pilotis at Kiel.

What is exceptional is the quality of his adaptation, and it is a craft argument rather than an intellectual one. Take the Kiel decisions individually: pulling the galleries half a metre off the façade, rotating the blocks so that solar orientation dictates the plan, painting the services rather than concealing them, commissioning sculptors for the entrance halls of a council estate, cutting twenty per cent from the cost in the second phase without abandoning the duplexes and terraces. None of these is a formal invention. Each is a designer noticing precisely where a doctrine imported from Paris would fail actual tenants in actual Antwerp weather, and fixing it. That accumulation of correct small judgements is what separates a landmark of social housing from the countless mediocre slabs that the same doctrine produced everywhere else in Europe.

The second claim is different in kind. *Het lelijkste land ter wereld* was, in 1968, an unusually clear-sighted diagnosis of a problem — car-dependent sprawl driven by a policy of letting every family build its own villa in a field — that most of Europe would not take seriously for another thirty years. Being right that early, in print, about your own country, is a genuine act of intelligence, and the 2018 reissue is the profession conceding as much.

The counter-case: Braem was often more effective as a scold than as a builder. His largest civic commission was left unfinished. His late organic work is admired far less than the early rigour. And a critic who tells his nation it is the ugliest in the world for thirty years, and watches it get uglier, has to be assessed partly on the results — which is to say, he lost.

Legacy

He moved into a nursing home in 1997 and died at Essen on 31 January 2001, aged ninety. His centenary in 2010 brought the exhibitions, the reappraisals and the visitors to Menegemlei 23. The Braemblokken still stand, still house people, still glow south-west in the afternoon — a working argument, seventy years old, that a country which cannot be bothered with beauty for its poorest citizens has decided something about itself.