Tuinwijk Moortebeek: a decorative garden village

The garden village is characterised by long streets running from north to south. By using Unwinesque design devises within such a modernist layout a greater degree of visual interest is created. Here for instance by bringing forward the building line to visually pinch the view along the street. The direction of the roof ridge is also employed to create interest.

The use of green verges in grass planted with trees is not employed regularly across the garden village. Where it is used the streets immediately take on a familiar garden village look.

Most streets rely on the green front garden with privet hedges and low gates to create the garden village feel. the roads have been turned into one-way streets to accommodate parking spaces for cars. These were of course not very prevalent when the garden village Moortebeek was originally built in the 1920s.

The architecture in the northern part is best characterised as romantic modernism. All component like windows, doors, awnings, chimneypots, etcetera, were standardised. The roof shapes vary but are variations on three basic types. All window frames and doors were (and are) painted in the same brown colour. The walls are rendered in a an off-white roughcast or have painted brick facades. The houses were built in classes; second class houses (left) are simpler in design and smaller in size than the first class houses (right) with their more expressive design details like this beautiful sculptural corner.

The streetscape with second class houses makes for a much simpler design than that of a street with first class houses. The unity in design, however, creates a pleasant atmosphere.

The Unwinesque devise of the close is also employed within this garden village. Within this more interesting spatial configuration the rather simple second class houses look the part and create the impression of a rural living environment.

The third class houses on the edge of the northern part of the garden village Moortenbeek are lower and smaller that the second class housing. The unity of design of the architecture by Jean-Francois Houben is clear in the overall look and the details.

The use of wooden window shutters creates a rural feel and also adds a practical detail to the garden village. All houses in every of the three classes have the shutters, creating great unity throughout. The central Avenue Shakespeare (right) is a wide, parklike, elongated public garden with tree lined streets on either side.

Along the sides of the former recreation ground of Moortebeek two large apartment blocks were built in the late 1950s by modernist architect René Bragard. At the centre part of the original park was kept as a public garden with now mature trees. Here a view at the back of one of the apartment buildings.

The cubist volumes of the building by Bregard (left) fit wonderfully well with the older architecture in the northern part of the garden village Moortebeek. The greyish-white colour complements the off-white of the older architecture. The brutalist architecture around the garden village makes for an uneasy contrast (shown right). The concrete high-rises and mid-rises are of an entirely different scale, volume and surface treatment.

The southern part of Moortebeek designed by Joseph Diongre shows a more expressive take on vernacular architecture making the whole tie in with of Art Deco. The houses built in terraces all have alternating architectural expressions. The floor plans, however, are the same.

Two examples of the decorative colour blocking employed by Diongre to break the facades of his terraced housing. Left a gable with colour blocking related to the windows and entrance. On the right an example of colour blocking used to break the length of the terrace by emphasising the vertical.

With the front gardens surrounded by privet hedges and uniform gates the garden village feel is also present in the southern part of Moortebeek. The overall impression is also similar due to the use of the off-white render on the facades. A one-way system is also in place here to create space for parking.

The use of colour blocking as a design devise to both emphasise functional parts of the buildings (entrances) as well as breaking up the facade and thus down scaling the visual impact can be clearly seen in the example on the left. In other places blocks of colour are used in a way similar to natural stone in vernacular architecture, creating a very attractive facade.

In the southern part there is also a distinction between first class housing, that is larger and decorated in a more elaborate way, and second class housing with les variation in roof shapes and a more repetitive decorative scheme of colour blocking on the ground floor only.

Tuinwijk Moortebeek, Brussels

The initiative for the development of the garden village of Cité de Moortebeek or Tuinwijk Moortebeek resulted from the foundation of the Housing Cooperative Collectieve Haarden (Hearths Collective) in 1921 by 120 members.

In 1922, aged 26, the architect Jean-Francois Houben won the design competition for the northern part of the new garden village of Moortebeek north of Anderlecht. With his design he placed himself firmly within the decorative strain of modern architecture. His projects, that also includes the garden village of Kapelleveld, show a strong Dutch influence with charming small dwellings with clear lines and decorative constructive elements. The houses south of the Avenue Shakespeare designed by the established architect Joseph Diongre show an even more expressive style of architecture and are probably of a later date. Extensions built after 1952 were designed by René Bragard (apartment blocks in the north) and Josse and Achille Mouton (apartments and terraces in the south).

The  dwellings of the two original sections of this garden village are characterised by the reoccurring use of off-white plaster for the rendering of the outer walls. The street facades have been emphasized by the use of simple details and the use of colour blocking (by Diongre). The placement and treatment of the buildings is related to long and short sight lines within and out of the garden village.

The Cité-Jardin Moortebeek is a garden village with a clear and rather repetitive layout which is much more varied in situ than comes across from the plan. The earliest part (A) is located north of the Avenue Shakespeare; the later part (B) directly south. After WW2 the former playing fields were built over with apartment buildings (C). South of the Avenue Shakespeare an area was developed with medium-rise blocks of flats and terraced housing (D). Around the garden village large high-rises have been erected, like the brutalist Parc du Peterbois (literally Peterwood Parc). The garden village consists mainly of housing with a school (s) and a community hall (H) on the edge of a large expanse of green at the northern entrance just of the Ninoofsesteenweg an important thoroughfare.

The garden village of Moortebeek is characterised by a very clear and regular layout with parallel streets running of an central elongated green space with an angled connection that alleviates the straightness of the streets. The layout with parallel streets is not Unwinesque but modernist in nature making the most of the sloping terrain and providing a similar aspect for most of the houses. When looking closely at the street layout it is evident that the garden village was originally intended to be larger with the Avenue Shakespeare extended further southwest and have more parallel streets. The layout was changed after WW2 and is more in keeping with what is commonplace in urban design in the 1950s.

The garden village is an intervention on a sloping site between pre-existing old farm roads (in yellow) and the nineteenth century thoroughfare Ninoofsesteenweg (literally: Stone paved road to Ninove - a city in Flanders). Here a number of more or less parallel streets were laid out around a central public garden. This Avenue follows an older road that has been incorporated as a footpath. The northern section also had two large green spaces on the edges.

The garden village now includes 330 family houses in terraces and semidetached houses and 124 apartments in post war blocks of flats. The houses were originally built in three so-called classes - first, second and third class. This system was especially common in the Low Countries and Germany and was probably introduced into Belgium from Germany via the Netherlands. A similar system was utilised by the Model Housing Societies during the Victorian era in England and was used as a way of active community building by managing the social mix of an area.. Third class housing does not mean third rate housing, but signifies the dwellings with the lowest rent aimed at the lowest paid workers. Such houses are often less decorative and smaller that first class housing, especially on the inside. But basic amenities are always included, as such social housing was aimed at improving the living conditions of all the working classes.

Once the garden village was located on higher ground between two brooks (the Broekbeek and Moortebeek) surrounded by fields. These have been since developed and this enclave is now surrounded by high-rises on all sides. The whole ensemble is in good condition and recent restoration work has made the houses look almost new in some places.

More blossoms

The blooms just keep on coming this year, especially the blossoming trees like these Japanese ornamental cherries (left and centre) and the crab apple with its single flowers (right).

Cité-Jardin Bon Air: rural living re-imagined

The entrance to the Cité Bon Air directly from the main road is dominated by these blocks in striking architecture. The bright buildings refer to German examples, which is clear in the roof treatment and the use of concrete moulded stone on the facade aimed at resembling natural stone.

This kind of architecture is typical for the period around 1930. It is unclear when this part of the Cité was built, but judging by the style of architecture it is the last part to have been completed, possibly as early as the latter part of the 1920s. The architecture is in a distinct modernist style best described as decorative functionalism. The door is typically emphasised by a Dutch awning (left). Most of these blocks consist of 4 dwellings, some have 3 and a few have 2. Individual expression in painting the window frames (seen on the right) rarely improves these buildings.

On streets where two building phases meet the contrast is evident. On the left hand side we see the simple vernacular architecture of the second phase with the contrasting modernist buildings on the right hand side. The street with front gardens and small cherry trees is typical of garden city movement principles.

The architecture of the first building phase is very similar to that of the Cité de la Roue. To emphasise the rural location great care has been taken to create long vistas out into the landscape from specific point in the garden village. Here a view down the Rue de Bonheur towards the forest at the edge of the Broekbeek valley. The brook itself is only visible from its banks, never from a distance.

The Rue the Bonheur is typical of Unwinesque urban design with a curving street picked up in the placement of the buildings on a greater curve  creating room for a broad green verge with trees between the road and the front gardens on one side making for a rural idyll.

A comparison between the architecture of the first phase (left) on the Rue de l'Enthousiasme with that of the second phase (right) on the Place Séverine shows similar architecture with simpler handling of the building mass and fully rendered facades instead of a play with combinations of brick and render. This is comparable to Cité de la Roue.

These buildings on the Rue Jean Lagey show the simplified architecture of the second phase clearly. The first block still has the characteristics of the first phase with the use of both brick and rendered sections. As this road is part of the main structure of the street layout it is not unthinkable that the long terrace was constructed in the first phase before the rest of the housing in this part of the Cité.

The Place Séverine differs in layout with the rest of the street plan. The stark orthogonal structure is emphasised in the placement of the housing at right angles. The southside has an equally orthogonal setup with a primary school and a kindergarten on the axis of the Avenue Auguste Bourgeois.

The placement of a semidetached pair of houses in the corner of a T-junction at an angle is a typical Unwinesque design device. So, although the architecture of the second phase is altogether less attractive some effort has been made to perpetuate the underlying ideal of creating a rural idyll on the edge of the metropolis.