Victor Bourgeois

Victor Bourgeois: Belgium's Argument for the Modern

At Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, on the western edge of Brussels, 275 dwellings went up between 1922 and 1925 in flat white planes and hard geometry. The Cité Moderne was social housing — municipal, cheap, built for people who had nothing — and in 1925 it won the Grand Prize at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris, the fair that gave Art Deco its name. Its architect was twenty-eight years old. It remains the single most important modernist housing estate in Belgium, and it made Victor Bourgeois the country's ambassador to the international avant-garde for the next four decades.

Charleroi and the Academy

Bourgeois was born on 29 August 1897 in Charleroi, the coal and steel city of Wallonia — a landscape of slag heaps, blast furnaces and appalling workers' housing that gave his later career its subject. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1914 to 1918, through the German occupation, and came under the mentorship of Henry van de Velde, the founder of Belgian Art Nouveau who had by then moved decisively toward a stripped modern idiom. Bourgeois began practising as an architect in Brussels in 1920.

Seven Arts

He arrived in a country that had almost no modern movement, and set about manufacturing one. With his brother, the poet Pierre Bourgeois, he founded magazines; the most consequential was *7 Arts*, which ran from 1922 to 1928 and became the central organ of Belgium's early modernism. The title states the ambition: architecture was to be argued for alongside poetry, painting, film and music, as one department of a single modern project.

His first significant building went up the same year the magazine started — an apartment block on the Rue du Cubisme in Koekelberg, in 1922, whose street name has the ring of a manifesto.

The Cité Moderne

Then came the Cité Moderne, designed and built at Berchem-Sainte-Agathe from 1922 to 1925.

Its ancestry is instructive. Bourgeois drew on Tony Garnier's *Cité Industrielle*, the French visionary plan for a rationally zoned socialist city, and on Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work was circulating through Europe in the Wasmuth portfolios. What he produced was purist: flat surfaces, unornamented volumes, a layout organised around collective open space rather than the speculative terraced street. Two hundred and seventy-five units is a substantial piece of city, not a demonstration project, and the Paris Grand Prize of 1925 confirmed that Europe had noticed.

Stuttgart, 1927

The confirmation came again two years later. When Mies van der Rohe assembled the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 1927 — the exhibition that presented the new architecture to the world, with Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, Scharoun and Taut on the roster — Bourgeois was the only Belgian invited to build.

To be the single national representative at Weissenhof at thirty is the clearest possible measure of how the international movement rated him. He was, in one standard formulation, the leading Belgian disciple of Le Corbusier.

The CIAM Years

In 1928 the modernists organised. Bourgeois was a founding member of the Congrès international d'architecture moderne and a delegate to its first meeting at La Sarraz; he went on to serve as Vice-President of CIAM. For thirty years he was the institutional channel through which International Modernism entered Belgium — one of only two Belgian architects in the organisation, and the one who did the arguing.

The commissions of this period show his range. The house and studio he built for the sculptor Oscar Jespers in Brussels in 1928 is a small, precise essay in the new manner. In 1939 he collaborated with his old mentor van de Velde and with Léon Stynen on the Belgian Pavilion at the New York World's Fair.

After the War

Bourgeois did not fade. He remained active as architect and planner until his death, designing many building types and publishing — books appeared under his name in 1946 and 1955, with another posthumously in 1971. His practice increasingly turned to urbanism and to civic buildings: town halls at Nivelles in 1954 and at Ostend from 1954 to 1960, and, for Expo 58 in Brussels, the Eternit Tower and the Germinal Pavilion. He died in Ixelles in July 1962, aged sixty-four.

Why Victor Is Called a Genius

The claim on Bourgeois is unusual because it is only partly architectural. His designed output, taken purely as form, is accomplished rather than revolutionary: the Cité Moderne is a superb application of ideas whose sources — Garnier, Wright, the emerging Corbusian purism — he himself did not originate. Nobody credits Bourgeois with inventing a language.

What he did invent was a national situation. In 1920 Belgium had van de Velde's Art Nouveau legacy and essentially nothing else; by 1930 it had a modern movement with a magazine, a flagship housing estate, an international competition presence and a seat at CIAM's top table. Bourgeois built all four. The relevant capacity is a kind of strategic intelligence — knowing that a building alone changes nothing, that it needs a journal to explain it, an institution to defend it, and a public commission to prove it works at scale, and having the energy to supply all of them personally.

The evidence others took him seriously is concrete rather than rhetorical: the 1925 Paris Grand Prize, the sole Belgian invitation to Weissenhof, the vice-presidency of CIAM. Those are judgements by Mies, by the CIAM membership, by an international jury — not by admirers.

The honest counter-case is that his reputation is largely national. Outside Belgium he is a footnote in the CIAM story rather than a figure in his own right; his best building came at twenty-eight and nothing later matched it; the postwar town halls and Expo pavilions are competent public work of no great consequence. Recent scholarship has examined how his ideal proposals fared when they became ordinary serial development in Brussels, which is a polite way of saying the utopia got diluted. He was a first-rate advocate and a very good architect. Whether that makes a genius depends on whether you count the movement he built as one of his works.

Legacy

The Cité Moderne still stands at Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, still housing people, a century after its foundations were dug — which is more than can be said for a great many celebrated modernist estates. Belgium's engagement with international modernism, from the CIAM years through the postwar reconstruction, ran through channels Bourgeois personally cut. And the records of the Belgian section of CIAM, covering 1928 to 1958, survive as an archive of exactly the thing he spent his life doing: making a small country argue with the century.

Achievements

• Trained at Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels and Academy of Fine Arts Aalst