A 6,000 square meter building with 720 windows symbolizing for Braem the quest for transparency.
Renaat Braem is considered one of the greatest Belgian architects of the 20th century. His great achievements were marked by his socialist ideology and by the internship he completed with Le Corbusier in 1936-37. He always sought to incorporate the concept of Radiant City and to interpret it according to one’s own conception of society. He wanted to build for a better world, transform society also through town planning and his art.
gullL’ellipse symbolise l’antidogme.
We can still see it with the rectorate of the VUB which he wanted to symbolize the philosophy of the University of which free examination is the watchword. For him, the building had to have a symbolic shape and he therefore preferred the ellipse to the right angle or circle that he had used in 1964 for the Glaverbel building in Watermael-Boisfort “because it has two centers and is therefore endowed with a certain dynamic. It symbolizes antidogma.”
Decompartmentalize
The floors of the VUB rectorate had been partitioned from the start in 1976, into offices, against Braem’s advice. The restoration removed these partitions to find an open space, an “open space”. We can then really discover the large fresco, 500 meters long, running over six levels and which Renaat Braem imagined and largely painted himself for ten years, sometimes with the help of his wife or assistants, until 1987, like the Mexican muralists.
It starts on the ground floor with the creation of the world and then takes place, on each floor, with the creation of plants, animals, then man and woman (in Braem the man comes out of the thigh of the woman and not the other way around, and the deer that we see painted could be his signature, because the deer “howls” like the name of the architect) to arrive on the fifth floor at the symbolic representation of the free man in a free human community. With the drawing of an owl for wisdom and an eagle for keen eyes as models for the rector to follow.
The fresco was never completed by Braem and the restoration left it as he had painted it.
The architect of the Model City in Laeken and the Middelheim pavilion wanted to affirm in this long fresco the progressive and humanist values of a university like the VUB. In passing, Braem evokes Nazism as well as the excesses of capitalism and the Church.
The services of the rectorate are gradually returning to the renovated building, sometimes with, unfortunately, heterogeneous furniture which again harms the vision of the fresco.
The adventure of modern architecture in Belgium
A large circular staircase in metal and wood goes up to the upper floors and has been continued to reach the roof which should in the future, when the budget is found, be made accessible to the public. Renaat Braem had also designed many elements of the furniture himself.
Inside, the colors (orange, blue, yellow) and the omnipresent curves have a surprising biomorphic, organic appearance. In the last period of her life, since the 1960s, Renaat Braem had begun a new formal approach. For him, good architecture must be the continuity of natural processes, it must become organic like mushrooms. He then did crazy things, like the Schoten municipal library.
