Abstract :
[en] Commissioned by the University of Louvain and mainly carried on between 1962 and 1972, the renovation of the Great Beguinage under the exclusive supervision of Raymond M. Lemaire (1921-1997) has been a crucial milestone in the development of conservative urban policies at the turn of the 1960’s. Widely celebrated as a implementation laboratory of the contemporary Venice Charter, of which Lemaire was one of the writers, the operation was considered a pilot project by the council of Europe and contributed to the promotion of the concept of integrated conservation. It is now inscribed on the world heritage list.
The in-depth study of the beguinage I had the opportunity to carry on during my PhD research, based on an extensive archival and photographic material, revealed that rather than a conservative project, respectful of the historical layering of the place, the operation had often consisted in a deep restoration of the individual buildings (houses and convents), bordering on reconstruction, in order to provide an ideal overall image of the pre-industrial city. At the light of Lemaire’s contemporary texts and reports presented on the international scene (Council of Europe, Unesco, ICOMOS), emphasising the benefits of a « traditional » environment for a healthy social life in response to the rising criticism towards the modernist model, the projects appears to have been a manifesto rather than a laboratory.
At the turn of the 1970’s, the success of the project helped Raymond Lemaire to get many commissions in Brussels, and what is particularly interesting for this session is that, while promoting a quite scientific approach of the urban areas to renovate, Lemaire cannot help but try to reproduce the ideal beguinage model. Confronted to a much more heterogeneous built environment, with a more complex historical layering than in Leuven, he can’t escape the temptation of reinventing the pre-industrial city architecture and urban layering on the basis of scarce fragments. Ranging from pastiche to late-modern re-interpretations, his projects, often not or very partly realised, illustrate not only his aesthetic parti pris but above all, his faith in the power of pre-industrial architecture, even reinvented, to make the city a better place to live in.
