Modern urban terraced houses or row houses emerged in Europe from the 17th century onwards. Usually two to three storeys high and with a garden at the back, they formed the traditional urban block. In Brussels, this bourgeois form of housing took on a particularly varied and inspiring form – including the well-known Art Nouveau residences – and forms the DNA of the city to this day. This publication analyses 100 selected examples illustrating the emergence of the terraced house and its further development in other forms of housing. The result is a broad panorama and a history of the architecture and development of the city of Brussels with its particularly heterogenous cityscape.
Pages: 352
Language: English
24 × 33 cm
645 b/w ill., 211 col. ill.
Publication: 20 Feb 2023
ISBN 978-3-0356-2553-0
Gérald Ledent is an architecture professor at UCLouvain in Brussels, where he teaches theory as well as in various studios. His PhD thesis, “Potentiels Relationnels”, explores the relations in dwelling between spaces and uses illustrated by an atlas of more than 10,000 housing units in Brussels. Ledent plays a coordination role in the Uses&Spaces research team, in which his interests focus on the relationship in architecture between uses and spaces, housing typo-morphologies, and research by design. Recently, Ledent co-edited Sustainable Dwelling (Brussels, PUL – PU Louvain, 2019), a book that examines the social and spatial dimensions of housing from a sustainability perspective. He is also the author of Institutions & the City: The Role of Architecture (Zürich, Park Books, 2022), which explores the role of architecture in establishing and perpetuating social structures and ideologies. Ledent has extensive experience as a practitioner in the fields of public buildings and collective housing developments in Belgium and abroad. He is the co-founder of the architectural practice KIS studio (Keep It Simple studio), which aims to avoid unnecessary complexity in order to focus on the essentials.
Alessandro Porotto is a postdoctoral researcher in the Uses&Spaces research group at UCLouvain, Brussels, and in the Architecture and the City research group at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. His research interests focus on the typological and historical evolution, as well as new forms, of urban housing and urban blocks in various cities. He is an architect who graduated from Politecnico di Torino, Italy (2012) and holds a PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland (2018) with a dissertation investigating the interwar housing typologies in Vienna and Frankfurt am Main. He was a visiting researcher at the Art History Department of Emory University, USA, to study the architectural design of public-housing initiatives in Atlanta (2020). Alongside peer-reviewed articles and contributions to international conferences, he is the author of the publication L’intelligence des formes: Le projet de logements collectifs à Vienne et Francfort (Geneva, MétisPresses, 2019).
„Das Buch kann schon jetzt als Standardwerk bezeichnet werden.“ (Friederike Meyer in BAUNETZWOCHE)
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„Ein wunderbares Buch! Gerald Ledent und Alessandro Porotto legen mit dem Atlas of Residential Building Types eine faszinierende Analyse des Brüsseler Wohnungsbaus vor, [...]“ (Ulrich Brinkmann in Bauwelt, 10.2023)
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„Das Buch von Ledent und Porotto bietet mit seinen Analysen und Vergleichsuntersuchungen des Bestands für das Weiterdenken eine wichtige Grundlage.“ (Sebastian Redecke in Bauwelt, 04.2024)
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„The book offers a broad panorama and a history of the architecture and urban development of Brussels.“ (https://uclouvain.be/fr/facultes/loci/brussels-housing-atlas-of-residential-building-types.html [25.07.2023])
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„The book provides an insight into the variety of housing forms in Brussels over the years. […] This superimposition of typical Belgian housing solutions is a formal and poetic chaos, but it could also provide answers to future challenges, such as the diversification of the demography. May this book be a tool to understand, perpetuate and invent new forms of living in Belgium.“ (https://welovebrussels.org/2023/07/monography-architecture-housing-brussels/ [25.07.2023])
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„On trouve ici une pléthore de points de référence qui permettent de réfléchir à ce que l’avenir pourrait réserver. Quiconque voudra désormais parler de l’habitat « typiquement bruxellois » ne pourra que difficilement passer à côté de cet ouvrage.“ (Pieter T'Jonck in: https://www.a-plus.be/fr/review/lhabitat-a-bruxelles-hier-et-demain/ [24.05.2023])
„Je krijgt hier een overvloed aan referentiepunten die toelaten na te denken over waar het in de toekomst heen kan gaan. Wie het nog over ‘typisch Brusselse’ huisvesting wil hebben zal dit werk hoe dan ook moeilijk kunnen negeren.“ (Pieter T'Jonck in: https://www.a-plus.be/nl/review/wonen-in-brussel-geschiedenis-en-toekomst/ [24.05.2023])