Legal expertise in professional construction periodicals

From the beginning of the 20th century, the construction sector in Belgium – as elsewhere – underwent a slow yet steady process of juridification. As technical standards, safety protocols, contracting procedures and liability regulations were becoming ever more detailed and elaborate, legislation increasingly pervaded the construction industry in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, the multitude of actors most directly touched by this growing legislative complexity – from architects and engineers, to contractors and suppliers – rarely received any legal training. As a result, the dissemination of legal knowledge quickly became a critical matter, not only for individual companies and professional branches, but also for the building sector as a whole.  

Nevertheless, the ways in which such vital expertise circulated to the wide array of construction players active in Belgium throughout the 20th century, has received limited scholarly attention. This paper offers a first exploration of this question, by investigating three professional periodicals published during the interbellum: La Technique des Travaux, predominantly oriented towards engineers, but also architects, L’Emulation, the long-standing journal of the professional organization Société Centrale d’Architecture de Belgique, and Bouwkroniek, a weekly mainly targeting contractors and industrial actors. This analysis reveals the crucial but complex roles such periodicals played in the emerging dissemination of legal building knowledge. These publications not only offered an outlet for the communication of good practices, novel technical standards, building certification and state legislation. They also became an arena where engineers, architects, contractors, and others expressed sometimes conflicting views on how new building legislation should take shape, thereby indirectly impacting law-making processes – the 1939 law on the protection of the Architect’s profession forms a case in point, but also the ways in which technical innovation and good practices informed legally binding construction standards. Moreover, with the juridification of the building sector, the industry offered an increasingly lucrative market for legal practitioners. Especially notaries, but also other construction law experts, used these periodicals to claim their stake in this untapped market, by publishing seemingly informative pieces that in fact predominantly sought to serve as advertisement and branding.

If our investigation of these periodicals highlights how legal knowledge was disseminated to the construction sector and how various professional actors in the building industry equally shaped legislative processes, our analysis also aims to reveal how such an interdisciplinary encounter between legal history and construction history can offer important insights for both fields.