Open AccessDe la région à l’unité de voisinage: l’urbanisme du Groupe L’Equerre, 1937-52
Author(s) -
Geoffrey Grulois
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
vlc arquitectura
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.219
H-Index - 1
eISSN - 2341-3050
pISSN - 2341-2747
DOI - 10.4995/vlc.2015.3414
Subject(s) - charter , urbanism , architecture , urban planning , unit (ring theory) , regionalism (politics) , geography , population , regional science , dominance (genetics) , archaeology , sociology , political science , civil engineering , engineering , mathematics education , mathematics , demography , politics , law , democracy , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
From 1937 to 1952, the young architects from Liège that formed Group L’Equerre and served as the secretariat of the Belgian section of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) initiated a reflection about the development of the Liège industrial agglomeration and its population centers. What sources did they mobilize to build a reflexive and multi-scalar approach to urban planning from the regional scale to that of the inhabited neigbourhood? The discovery of the original drawings of the survey of the Liège Region (1948-1952) and plans for a neighborhood unit on the plateau of Trixhes (1937-1952) in two archives—Archives of the city of Liège and the archives of architecture of ULB—allow us to explore an emerging practice of regional planning and neighborhood design in Belgium. In this article, we trace how architects from Group L’Equerre took advantage of the advance in human geography and regional planning to build a specific planning approach to Belgian cities that goes beyond the CIAM principles of the functional city in order to incorporate concerns for the natural environnement and traditional community levels. In this way, the paper questions the supposed dominance of the Athens Charter for modern urbanism on the development of postwar town planning in Belgium by identifying the emergence of landscape and community issues in the practice of regional and local development