Corporate Arcadia Magazine by CIVA

corporate arcadia

BUILT BRUSSELS AFTER 1989

Corporate Arcadia An exhibition of CIVA Foundation, organised by contemporary Architecture department 23.06.2017 – 24.09.2017 Fondation CIVA Stichting President Yves Goldstein Director Pieter Van Damme Director contemporary Architecture Department Cédric Libert Curatorship & exhibition design Sophie Dars Carlo Menon Collaboration Carlo Goncalves Photography Armin Linke Assistant photography Silvia Cappellari Texts Accattone Dan Graham Lars Lerup orthodoxe Manfredo Tafuri Video interviews Sefik Birkiye Nicolas Firket Freek Persyn Philémon Wachtelaer Graphic design Ismaël Bennani Orfée Grandhomme (Überknackig) Video Gogolplex Traductions Patrick Lennon Eriks Uskalis Coordination, production, construction, pedagogical activities and communication Jamal Ahrouch, Marcelline Bosquillon, Francelle Cane, Mostafa Chafi, Stéphanie De Blieck, Patrick Demuylder, Jacques de Neuville, Renaud De Staercke, Tania Isabel Garduño, Sébastien Gilette, Manon Kempinaire, Christophe Meaux, Mihai Minecan, Véronique Moerman, Anne-Marie Pirlot, Laureline Tissot, Dieter Vanthournout CIVA Foundation Aïcha Benzaktit, Cindy Bertiau, Danny Casseau, Catherine Cnudde, Germaine Courtois, Dominique Dehenain, Oana De Wolf, Anna Dukers, Chaïmae El Ahmadi, Andréa Flores, Sophie Gentens, Ophélie Goemaere, Eric Hennaut, AnneCatherine Laroche, Anne Lauwers, Hugo Martin, Salima Masribatti, Noëlla Mavula, Mabiala Mpiniabo M’Bulayi, Luc Nagels, Mostafa Nanes, Yaron Pesztat, Lola Pirlet, Pascale Rase, Inge Taillie, Sarah Tibaux, Sandra Van Audenaerde, Martine Van Heymbeeck, Vincent Vanhoutte

‘One of the peculiar beauties of the twentieth-century context is that it is no longer the result of one or more architectural doctrines evolving almost imperceptibly, but which represent the simultaneous formation of distinct archaeological layers; they result from a perpetual pendulum movement where each architectural doctrine contradicts and undoes the essence of the previous one as surely as day follows night. The resulting landscape needs the combined interpretative ability of Champollion, Schliemann, Darwin and Freud to disentangle it.’ Rem Koolhaas, ‘The Terrifying Beauty of the 20th Century’ (1985) Corporate Arcadia is an exhibition on the passing of time. The starting point – 1989 – represents both yesterday and prehistory. If proof were needed, we only need to put three events back in the context of that year: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events of Tiananmen Square, and the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. Remote elements in our collective, deep memory and yet are still present in our individual, surface memories. The year 1989 is also the year commonly accepted as marking the birth of the first generation of ‘digital natives’ – those who make up today’s youth. This change in our relation with time presents all the traits of a noteworthy paradigm shift: the switch from the predominance of the long time – deep memory – to the dominance of the short time – surface memory. An upheaval of ethos that is not without consequences for our urban environment. Historically, the city has always been seen as a stable reality that human life traversed, following the twists and turns of its own movements and existential vagaries. Strangely, during the past century, the twentieth, the urban transformations seem to have supplanted the unstable character of human life. Today one recalls the successive transformations of a state of the world that one has known, and not inherited from the splendour of time immemorial. From now on, the reality of changing cities takes its place in human memory, straddling different registers of variables. As an echo of and/or counterpoint to the exhibition Save the city, Change the city – Unbuilt Brussels #1, which bears in its very foundations the promises of an absolute ideal, we have chosen to negotiate the reality of the present time by inviting two curators – Sophie Dars and Carlo Menon, Accattone – whose methodological (im)pertinence could record a state of affairs and not a state of change. Like the photograph taken on 30 May in Brussels by Armin Linke, which features on the exhibition poster, it is a question of looking in a harsh light at a reality which is there, laid out before our eyes: the difficulty in viewing it consists in accounting for it, in plain language and without any excess. Cédric Libert

Fondation CIVA Stichting is supported by The Brussels-Capital Region. June 2017 © The architects, editors, authors, photographers. © Fondation CIVA Stichting Rue de l’Ermitage 55 Kluisstraat / Bruxelles 1050 Brussel Belgium

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CIVA Foundation’s introduction Corporate Arcadia, curators’ introduction Armin Linke, Inside the Corporate Arcadia (1, 2, 8, 10, 67, 68)

orthodoxe, No one ever steps into the same river twice

24 Constantin Brodzki, Sophisticated cabinet-making 32

Accattone on Philippe Samyn’s Technical quest

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Cédric Libert, Martini Lotto Rem Koolhaas, La prise de l’Europe Manfredo Tafuri, L’avvocato del diavolo Lars Lerup, A note on xdga’s public projects in Brussels

Dan Graham, Corporate Arcadias

Thanks to For the helpful encounters: Jean Attali, Olivier Bastin, Mathieu Berger, Jean-Didier Bergilez, Pierre Blondel, Constantin Brodzki, Antoine Crahay, Laurence Creyf, Lieven De Boeck & Xaveer De Geyter, Isabelle Doucet, Marc Dubois, Joachim Declerck & Roeland Dudal, Jean-Michel Jaspers, Christian Kieckens, Kris Kimpe, Sarah Levy, Benoit Moritz, Patrice Neirinck, Sara Noel Costa de Araujo, Stephan Petermann, Vincent P. Alexis, Philippe Samyn, Christophe Van Gerrewey

For the visits and the models: Maurizio Alabiso, Florence Angelici, Nico Bécu, Thierry Belenger, Kim Creten, Geert Cromphout, Horacio Da Silva, Lieven De Boeck, Liesbeth De Buysser, Roxane De Craemer, Martine De Keyser, Patricia De Peuter, Joachim Derwael, Dirk Govaert, Haroun Fenaux, Gerrit Feyaerts, Aurel Gavriolaia, Jonathan Heusicom, Robin Lejeune, Stef Leunens, Johan Lievens, Bernard Lizin, Irène Lund, Denis Luxen, Pascal Marlière, Thierry Martiny, Joël Mathieu, Thierry Meeus, Claire Mols, Pierre Muller, Evita Naumova, Marc Noirfalise, Eric Philippe, Gert Potoms,

curators’ introduction

Corporate Arcadia ‘Brussels is good for a photographer, not for an architect’1

rants, footbridges and hanging gardens, in-house maintenance and guarantee services, broadcasting studios, themed cafeterias, museums, multipurpose event spaces, auditoriums, sometimes even travel agencies, a mail service, newsagents, bank branches and ATMs: a city within a city for thousands of employees, an architectural continuum where everything has been designed, from the monumental atrium glass roof to the lift’s button, encompassing the whole building on all scales in the spirit of the end-of-the-century Total Work of Art. This mix of domesticated nature, bureaucracy and dramatized monumentality was already noted by artist Dan Graham writing on large atrium buildings, like those designed by John Portman for the Hyatt Hotels in the 1970s: ‘The urban corporate atrium is an attempt to smooth over contradictions between environmental decay and technological progress. As a mini-utopian retreat from the stresses of city life, it revokes the notion of “garden” as idealized landscape (the return to a pre-urban Eden).’2 In the Corporate Arcadia you could indeed live forever: electric generators and fuel reservoirs could keep the main functions up and running for hundreds of employees for many days, ‘even in the case of a total blackout over Belgium’.

This exhibition project started in February 2017 as a carte blanche in response to the question, ‘What has most influenced the real and the imaginary fabric of Brussels since 1989?’ Despite the creation of the Brussels-Capital Region and the introduction of new instruments to encourage public and private projects, the city has mostly been shaped by the corporate architecture of banking headquarters, office buildings and hotels. While in the 1970s and 1980s the architectural debate was rich in proposals and counterproposals, in the 1990s the built reality took over by sheer numbers. Large office blocks appeared on the Canal, in Little Manhattan, in the abandoned areas of the city centre, on Place Stéphanie, in the European Quarter and around RondPoint Schuman. Some office towers were dismantled, sometimes to be rebuilt; a few were refurbished. A strange doppelgänger appeared next to the Cathedral, the Marquis. Facing the Chambon, the Radisson Blu. At Place du Luxembourg, a private consortium A documentary approach of a dozen architectural firms and promoters started building what would officially be declared the European Parliament only The exhibition takes these built architectures as a given. They after its completion. are not presented as mere ‘found objects’ in the city fabric, but as matters of fact to investigate. The compressed time frame of the Neither old enough to be ‘history’ nor recent enough to be still project, the curatorial approach to these buildings, the display vivid for the public, these buildings have already been absorbed and the nature of the original contents produced for the exhibiinto the city’s incoherent whole, with its terrific potential to tion point to their status as preliminary notes for a further developchange endlessly while remaining essentially the same. Besides ment of the topic. In line with the editorial method of Accattone very few articles in Belgian architectural reviews, or some debates magazine, these exhibits should be intended as fragments, not as organized by platforms such as Disturb, such buildings seem fully developed arguments. They call for a suspension of judgeto have been disregarded by architecture culture. They are the ment: this first attempt to look at these buildings as historical most evident architectural manifestations of the 1990s and early artefacts while respecting the past’s intrinsic irony could not and 2000s, yet they remain hidden in plain sight, almost unnoticed did not aim for scientific rigour. It offers instead the opportunity by architects and passers-by, like elephants in the room. to approach them with a twist that sets the exhibition at an artistic and architectural level.

Inside the Corporate Arcadia

First, the stepped ‘theatre of objects’ assembles models and documents retrieved on site or from the architects’ archives. The disDue to their size and presence in the city, all these buildings tance from the viewers, though, restricts the possibility for inhave a public dimension, while their inside is mostly inaccessible. spection, making them silent witnesses of the scene. Are they the Highly secured, they represent the bodies of many public and pri- actors or the public? vate institutions that rule over the lives of citizens, architectures through which a company or a service literally gets in-corporated, embodied. The content of such buildings exceeds their social function. Besides ordinary office spaces and meeting rooms, they reveal a full interior urbanism of alleys, atriums, lounge areas, cleaning ser2 Dan Graham and Robin Hurst, ‘Corporate Arcadias’, Artforum (December vices, fitness centres, underground canteens and top-floor restau- 1987), pp. 68-74. See also John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Architect as 1

Christian Kieckens in conversation with Accattone, March 2017.

Clémence Piedelievre, Michel Robberechts, Vincenzo Rosso, David Roulin, Laura Semey, Charlotte Snios, Leo Van Broeck, Angélique Vancraenenbroeck, Marc Van Neck, Didier Vanderhasselt, Marc Vanneck, Hans-Bart Van Impe, Stefan Vansant, Kevin Versailles, Georges Volders, John Vrebos, Iris Walter, Alain Wouters For their precious help: Maxime Delvaux, Marie-Cécile Guyaux, Roxane Legrelle, Iwan Strauven, Tom Weaver

Developer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976) and Charles Rice, Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

Second, Armin Linke’s photographic work from inside the Corporate Arcadia reveals, from today’s viewpoint, the hidden activities of these institutions and at the same time ‘restores beauty to these invisible sites’ (Bruno Latour), combining architecture, interior design and social function.3 Third, the magazine excerpts and the videos offer thematic insights and counterpoints in the form of seven ‘double figures’. Each building has been associated with a double – a project built for the same company in the past, on the same site, designed by the same architects or moved by similar intentions – and tackled according to a specific architectural theme. These couplings let multiple dimensions emerge, ‘critical knots’ that enable the exhibition to step beyond a small history of Brussels in the 1990s: the (re)construction of the city, captured between a new sensitivity to the built environment and the rush for office spaces in the new Capital of Europe; the call for internationally renowned architects to work in collaboration with local firms; the evolution of both clients and architectural firms, from individuals to groups; the crisis of styles, even in the work of the same architect, oscillating between International Style and eclecticism, a longing for art deco and classicism, tones of Gothic architecture and high-tech (all under the postmodern umbrella); quests for ‘total design’ and technological excellence; the representation of power and its architectural tropes, the facade, the atrium, the mirror.

Their trajectories reflect the changes that the profession underwent at the turn of the century. With the specialization and globalization of the building sector, multiple figures emerged that fragment the usual trinity of architect-client-contractor. Promoters, foreign investors, end users, programmers, project and facility managers, quantity surveyors, fluid engineers, building-site experts, legal counsellors, skilled subcontractors, transportation companies and stock-exchange brokers became indispensable actors of a project. In order not to succumb to these stakeholders, architects changed too: practices expanded and became larger service firms, identified by acronyms or by the principal partners’ names. Within the office or through opportune partnerships, architects reinforced links with the building industry and its increasing mechanization; they cultivated the difficult common ground with promoters and investors, whose language very often sticks to money and time alone; they maintained relations with local politicians and their sometimes unfamiliar views on how a building should look like or how tall it should be.5

These forms of pragmatism come from America. Most of the architects involved in the exhibition mention important experiences in the US at the beginning of their career. Sefik Birkiye was first able to give built form to his (and Krier’s) ideas on the Reconstruction of the European City in New York and Chicago. From the UN headquarters building site, Constantin Brodzki brought back to Belgium the workflow and the experimental, integrated approach to every building component during the design The Other Architect phase of a project. Philippe Samyn explored steel structures as deIn regard to a recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for veloped at MIT, importing new calculation methods that increase Architecture,4 our ‘Other Architects’ are not those who, engaged elegance while reducing the volume of matter. in other intellectual activities, do not necessarily build, but precisely those who were in charge of the largest projects in Brussels in the last decades – those able to deal with the promoters, who The terrifying beauty of the 1990s can talk money and satisfy the demands of influent real-estate owners. They are the architects that Belgian architecture cul- The pragmatic turn of the profession and the pressure on real ture fails to recognize and to welcome on its platforms, probably estate in the newly appointed Brussels-Capital Region and because they are too complicit with the forces of capital to be Capital of Europe do not necessarily result in data-sheet architecconsidered worthy of interest. Charles Rice’s recent book Interior ture. Cost-effective buildings sometimes call for a certain status Urbanism also stresses ‘a kind of lack within architectural his- with regard to the institution that they house. The demand for tory and theory around what is inadequately called the “com- buildings signed by international architects like Ricardo Bofill, mercial” production of this period’. Understanding these projects Helmut Jahn or Michael Graves reveals the search for an archidemands indeed a different set of rules for both architecture and tecture of the image, where few architectural features convey the its architects. postmodern monumentality of the total work of art. But if the facade pleases the authorities who grant the building permit, the 3 Two main works steered the photographic commission towards artist Armin Linke: Il Corpo dello Stato (Zurich: JRP | Ringier, 2010) on the many institutions interior usually responds to market logics. It is telling that the cited in the Italian Constitution, and Inside/Outside (Amsterdam: Roma, 2015) work of such international architects is often limited to the exon private and public institutions in Paris. Linke’s growing collection feeds the terior, while the rest is built by local firms that can ensure good expanding exhibition The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen. The quotation is from Bruno Latour, ‘Armin Linke, or Capturing / Recording the Inside’, Inside/ Outside, p. 44. 4 The Other Architect, CCA, Montreal, 28 Oct 2015 – 10 April 2016. Eponymous catalogue edited by Giovanna Borasi (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015).

5 In a straightforward set of interviews with François Nizet published in A+ no. 122 (1993), ‘S’associer, collaborer, sous-traiter, conseiller’, André Jacqmain deplores ‘the practice of packing together architects from various political affiliations for any important commission related to the State or the municipalities. Architecture is a galaxy of stakeholders’ (p. 23).

relations with the building industry. The liberal interplay of references and quotations has added yet another layer to the complex image of the city, mirroring the previous stylistic trends that have left their mark in Brussels: the Gothic and the eclectic, art nouveau and art deco insertions, the bureaucratic takeover after World War II. The renewed attention to typology, also thanks to the rise of trained architects in the new regional administration, certainly provides ‘better’ natural light and street alignments. But the increasing scale of these buildings and the stylistic frenzy that inhabits architecture in the 1990s consolidate the city of Brussels as ‘an exciting spectacle of contrasts and paradoxes’, ‘a collage of fragments of grandiose, visionary projects’ resulting in ‘conflicting images, scales and architecture idioms’.6 The focus of Corporate Arcadia insists indeed on such interplay. The double figures and their combination enabled the exhibition project, in the making, to refine the questions it raises. How long is the life cycle, both technically and stylistically, of the largescale interventions that architects of all sides claim for the city? Can an architect interfere in the power structures of building process and city development, and to what extent? Can architecture embrace the contemporary condition of laissez-faire, of ‘anything goes’, yet develop designs that challenge it? The architecture models convened on stage – the theatre of objects – are called to perform as embodied figures, mirroring the temporary amphitheatre at the entrance to the CIVA Foundation where public and guests will be invited to debate. Their position is static, but the concepts they carry are mobile, open to interpretation and recombination: the same figures can easily be given new roles; new acts can be added to the play. Sophie Dars and Carlo Menon

ARMIN LINKE INSIDE THE CORPORATE ARCADIA The buildings presented at this exhibition have usually been portrayed by their architects before occupation, in the canon of architectural photography (symmetry, geometrical composition, cleanliness, wide-angle, sharpness, details). Then access has become difficult for the public: little is known about their interior. What lies behind the facades? Is the design outmoded, or did it keep the ‘eternal’ character that some architects intended to convey? How does everyday use affect the building? What kind of anthropology can be revealed by the archaeological tool of the camera? The original contribution by artist Armin Linke to the exhibition was the opportunity to explore and reveal the inside of fifteen buildings completed after 1989. If the colour pictures on the walls condense an architectural continuum in which the individual buildings are barely recognisable, the black and white, large format travelogue provides a richer perspective. Tenderly and brutally, without judgement nor aestheticisation. cover The President’s lobby in the European Parliament, Paul-Henri Spaak building (1993), Association des Architectes du CIC: C.R.V., Marc Vanden Bossche, C.D.G., Studiogroep Dirk Bontinck inside cover Elevators in the atrium the Radisson Hotel (1989) Michel Jaspers & Partners (Jaspers–Eyers), Atelier d’Art Urbain (Vizzion) pp. 8-9 Detail of Paul Delvaux’s Dawn on the City (1940) from the Belfius Art Collection, exhibited on the 32nd floor of the Belfius Tower, Samyn & Partners, Jaspers–Eyers Architects pp.10-11 Stock-exchange Euronext’s stand in the atrium of the Marquis building (1990), Atelier d’Architecture de Genval, ELD Partnership inside back cover Director’s office on the eight floor KBC headquarters (1994), looking towards the Proximus Towers (1996) and the North Galaxy Towers (2004), Michel Jaspers & Partners (Jaspers–Eyers), Atelier d’Art Urbain (Vizzion) back cover The auditorium’s lobby on the ground floor of KBC headquarters (1994) Michel Jaspers & Partners (Jaspers–Eyers), Atelier d’Art Urbain (Vizzion) Corporate Arcadia poster Rossian elevator in the atrium of the Proximus Towers (1996), Michel Jaspers & Partners (Jaspers-Eyers)

6 Géry Leloutre and Iwan Strauven, ‘Brussels-Europe: An Aporia?’, in Pier Vittorio Aureli et al., Brussels – A Manifesto (Rotterdam: NAi, 2007), p. 205.

É. R. / V. U. : PIETER VAN DAMME, FONDATION CIVA STICHTING RUE DE L’ERMITAGE 55 KLUISSTRAAT – BRUXELLES 1050 BRUSSEL

Original photographs by Armin Linke Magazine excerpts by Accattone, with texts by Dan Graham, Lars Lerup, Cédric Libert, orthodoxe, Manfredo Tafuri A lecture by Rem Koolhaas / OMA (2003) commented by Freek Persyn and Nicolas Firket Video interviews to Sefik Birkiye, Philémon Wachtelaer Projects by André Jacqmain / Atelier d’Architecture de Genval, Fitzroy Robinson & Partners, A.J. De Doncker, ELD partnership, Gordon Bunshaft / SOM, Samyn & Partners, Atelier d’Art Urbain / Vizzion Architects, Jaspers – Eyers & Partners, Constantin Brodzki, Ricardo Bofill, CERAU, Xaveer De Geyter Architects, C.R.V., Marc Vanden Bossche, C.D.G., Studiogroep Dirk Bontinck, Michael Graves, Lucien De Vestel, Jean Gilson, André & Jean Polak, Pierre Lallemand, Steven Beckers, Art & Build, Montois and Partners, Helmut Jahn, ARC, Atelier d’architecture Paul Noël, Vander Elst, René Stapels, Géo Bontinck, Jacques Cuisinier, CDG – Czyz, de Laveleye & Grochowski, L. Konior and J. Kowal Curatorship: Carlo Menon & Sophie Dars Collaboration: Carlo Goncalves & Fondation CIVA Stichting Photography: Armin Linke Grafic design: Überknackig Video: Gogolplex