Research Seminar

Post-war Antwerp faced a paradox: a booming port demanded expansion, yet the city’s historic core offered little room to grow. To reconcile economic ambition with urban continuity, densification became imperative. Along the grand boulevards of De Leien—once lined with stately bourgeois houses—rows of terraced homes in brick gave way to modern apartment blocks in concrete. This transformation, mainly unfolding between 1945 and 1975, but still ongoing today, was far from a neutral process of “stoffwechsel”, but initiated and drove a profound reconfiguration of morphology, materiality, and socio-cultural meaning of the urban fabric.

This research re-traces that shift, not as an abstract narrative of modernization, but through the tangible evidence of building permits, construction files, and archival plans, complemented by fieldwork and photography. These documents reveal how the introduction of reinforced and prefabricated concrete did more than replace traditional masonry: it altered parcel structures, courtyard logics, and façade rhythms, embedding new scales and typologies into the city’s DNA. Concrete was not merely a technical upgrade—it became a driver of spatial and cultural change, reshaping how urban life was organized and perceived.

Graphical analysis, inspired by the morphological school of Panerai, Castex, and Muratori, visualizes this evolution in detail. Each block along De Leien becomes a palimpsest where traces of bourgeois hôtels coexist with the assertive geometries of modern slabs—a hybrid cityscape that defies the utopian clarity of the “rational city in concrete.” Instead, what emerges is a nuanced portrait of Belgium’s concrete city: layered, opportunistic, and deeply entangled with socio-economic forces. By mapping this interplay between material innovation and urban form, the project reframes post-war Antwerp as a site of negotiation rather than rupture—a city where concrete did not simply replace stone, but re-scripted the very grammar of urbanity.