Between Educationalization and Appropriation: Selected Writings on the History of Modern Educational Systems

15. Modern Architecture Meets New Education: Renaat Braem’s Design and the Brussels Decroly School (1946)

15 Modern Architecture Meets New Education: Renaat Braem’s Design and the Brussels Decroly School (1946)* F. Herman, A. Van Gorp, F. Simon, B. Vanobbergen & M. Depaepe ❙ ❙ Design Apotheosis in the Heart of Belgian Educational Renewal A number of ambitious and innovational plans were sketched in the course of the twentieth century for L’École Decroly l’Ermitage, a progressive school for “normal” children founded in 1907 by Ovide Decroly (1871-1932).1 Among them were the 1946 plans of architects Renaat Braem (1910-2001) and Jack Sokol (1911-1977) and the 1972 design of the Groupe Brederode (cf. Figure 1).2 The latter design dates back to the period in which the school, located on the edge of Terkamerenbos in Ukkel (south of Brussels), was threatened with expropriation because of the plans to expand the Brussels Ring.3 At this time, architects Emmanuel de Callatay, Michel * Originally published in: Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis/ Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine, XLI,1-2 (2011) 135-166. 1 Decroly, a Belgian neurologist and psychiatrist, is primarily known as an educational reformer , for he developed his own educational method and is considered to be one of the pioneers of the New Education Fellowship. Starting from criticism on the “old school”, and considering that a child observes things globally, he presented the subject matter not in subjects but in larger wholes. The subject matter, which had to be processed actively and expressively, was linked to the so-called centres of interest of the child, which were organised around four biological needs: the need for food, protection, and defence (these all went back to the basic need for self-preservation), and the instinct of solidarity or the basic need to assure the survival of one’s own species. From this perspective, much attention was devoted to social development. The Decroly Method has often been summed up in the slogan “pour la vie, par la vie” (for more details, see, Van Gorp, 2005). 2 These design drawings are preserved in the Centre d’Études Decrolyennes (CED) and les Archives de l’Architecture Moderne (AAM). Since there is no reliable classification system in the CED, and for the sake of not burdening the notes and glosses unnecessarily, we refer to the sources with the abbreviation CED or AAM, the file name, supplemented with a title or a description of the document, and – where possible – the name of the author and the date. 3 The route of the Ring was revised in 1972 (CED, file: Le Ring 1970). The 1927 site has been retained up to the present. Part IV: Appropriation Processes in Theory and Praxis 332 Lamy and Georges Vranckx were aware of the possible sale of undeveloped land in Ukkel. They first sketched a design for a residential park. Only later, in anticipation of the search by the school administration for a new location and new facilities, they incorporated a pavilion school into their design. However, the plan was developed without there having been any consultation between them and the school administration.4 For this reason, we put aside the plan of the Groupe Brederode and will concentrate on the design by Braem and Sokol. This project of 1946 attracted our attention for a number of reasons. Figure 1: Design of the Groupe Brederode (1972) First, modernistic school buildings and designs, such as the one of Braem en Sokol, were rather an exception in Belgium in the 1940s. The rise of Modern Architecture during the interwar period, with the International Congress of Modern Architecture as its zenith, until then had yielded little more in Belgium than a handful of modern schools (Verpoest, 1992; Braeken, 2009, 3).5 Nevertheless, the modern school construction in the surrounding countries was gazed at in wonderment from Belgium already in the thirties. This is shown, for example, by the richly illustrated publication Onderwijs en Scholenbouw in België en Nederland (Education and School Construction in Belgium and the Netherlands) of 1931. In it, the modern 4 Interview with Emmanuel de Callatay, 17/03/2009 (Kindermansstraat 5, 1050 Ixelles). 5 Les Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), founded in 1928 by Le Corbusier and others, and closed down in 1959, were international platforms for modern architects such as Hendrik Berlage, Hugo Häring, André Lurçat, Ernst May, Hannes Meyer, Louis Herman De Koninck, and Huib Hoste. The first four congresses – of a series of ten – were held in 1928, 1929, 1930, and 1933 in La Sarraz (Switzerland), Frankfurt, Brussels, and Athens...