‘Beyond the brass plate’

With Brussels as the (often self-proclaimed) birthplace of art nouveau, its cityscape is dotted with an innumerable amount of iconic and lesser-known architectural gems. On many of these carefully crafted façades, brass plates and name inscriptions serve as signatures of architectural authorship, providing a record of the Belgian capital’s productive architectural scene during the first half of the 20th century. Remarkably, many of these plates not only mention building year and the architect’s name, but also ‘SCAB’, or the ‘Central Society of Belgian Architects’. At first glance, this may seem today like an outdated and conspicuous way of billboarding one’s close affiliation with an exclusive professional organization. One of the main spearheads of the SCAB, however, was developing and advertising legal expertise and support for architects, strategically reappropriating legislative ‘customary’ principles in order to rewrite the legislative framework, improve legal honoraria, and, eventually, the law for professional protection of 1939. These brass plates thus equally served as a way to cement public support to the SCAB’s efforts of legislative lobbying, and raise questions about the multifarious, and often inconspicuous ways in which law is literally inscribed into our built environment.

Taking up Ricardo Agarez and Nelson Mota’s (2015) call to look ‘beyond the brass plate’ and explore the ‘bread and butter of architecture’, I zoom in on three architects with different profiles, who, against the backdrop of the legal lobbying efforts of organizations such as SCAB, all explicitly developed legal expertise and activities. As one of the true pioneers of the Belgian modernist movement, Louis-Herman De Koninck (1896-1984) was a core member of SCAB, and designed several of Belgium’s most canonical modernist buildings. Nevertheless, the architect was widely active in various legal domains during the beginning of his career, from counselling and arbitration of property and building conflicts, to notarial real estate activities. While De Koninck reduced these activities as his fame grew, others, such as the successful yet lesser-known art deco architects Gaston and Roger Ide, pursued legal practices throughout their career. Ide particularly served as legal expert for criminal court cases, and his archives contain numerous minutely drawings of crime scenes and plausible homicide scenarios. Eliane Havenith, lastly, was one of the first female architects in Belgium. Despite being an important correspondent of SCAB and CIAM, and her impressive resume including urban planning studies at Columbia University, she has long been overlooked by contemporaries as well as architectural historians today. Competing within a male-dominated building sector, she supplemented her modernist design activities by repeatedly serving as legal expert for real estate estimations as well as property and neighbour disputes.

Whether to launch, sustain, or compete for a career, the legal activities of these different architects thus provide a glimpse into the ways architecture is not limited to iconic production. Instead, it is, and has long been, thoroughly engaged with its ‘bread and butter’, not only, as Agarez and Mota point out, producing anonymous architecture that provides stability for this ‘financially fragile profession,’ but even claiming stakes in domains beyond its professional boundaries.