LA CITÉ
[Revue Mensuelle Belge D’Architecture et D’Urbanisme]
December 1932
R. Verwilghen [Editor]
R. Verwilghen [Editor]: LA CITÉ [Revue Mensuelle Belge D’Architecture et D’Urbanisme]. Bruxelles: Librairie Dietrich & Co., December 1932. Original edition. Text in Belgian. Slim quarto. Stapled photo illustrated wrappers. 20 [xvi] pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Wrappers lightly rubbed, but a very good or better copy.
9.25 x 12.25 saddle-stitched journal with 20 pages of illustrated articles and 16 pages of period advertisments, including a full page ad for Architect L. H. de Koninck’s Cubex kitchen. The CUBEX kitchen—a truly innovative modular and standardized kitchen furniture system—was a collective creation of the Belgian Members of CIAM. These Rational Kitchens were very popular in the bourgeoisie and installed in many Belgian houses.
The main article is a seven page feature with 21 photographs and diagrams of the Canneel House [1931], a functional residential masterpiece designed by L. H. de Koninck in collaboration with Jean Canneel-Claes, a modernist landscape architect.
After vainly asked Le Corbusier to design his own house with a garden in continuity with the interior spaces, Caneel turns to less well known Belgian architect Louis Herman de Koninck and designing what became a work emblematic of modernity in Belgium: Canneel House. Indoor and outdoor spaces are in balance: the garden does not compete with the house, nor it is his subject, simply kicks off the geometry of architecture and complete it. For Canneel the garden is the spatial composition of voids and solids according to a precise architectural rhythm: in this design the discontinuous lines of short rows of poplars and the open corner of the garden show this rhythm. In his numerous writings, Canneel stresses the need to overcome romantic and sentimental spirit of spontaneous Garden, as well as the smug artificiality of formal garden, in favor of what he calls “functional Garden”, a garden so hospitable, poetic, fulfilling the needs, physical and emotional practices of users. Canneel refuses the role of gardener as one who is involved only in choosing plants. The garden project poses a series of formal issues, psychological, social and certainly practical. It is not a decorative art but a scope of architecture, it is a discipline with important social responsibilities: participates, as well as buildings and, to a larger scale, of entire cities, to the physical and moral development of humans, both as individuals and as a community.
“De Koninck vertically compressed the program into a cubic volume and complemented interior rooms with outdoor ones. The living spaces and study on the ground collected southern and western light through large expanses of glazing and led to the garden beyond. The bedrooms on the second floor opened onto a south-facing terrace and the top floor featured a solarium. Although more modest than that of Le Corbusier’s Villa Meyer, Canneel’s rooftop was also for sunbathing and exercising, with curtains that provided privacy and selectively framed the views. […]
“De Koninck also designed a line of furniture specially for Canneel. Modest, modern and efficient, the interior and exterior of the house formed a functionalist gesamtkunstwerk.”
One of the leading Belgian architects of the 20th century, Louis Herman De Koninck (1896 –1984) developed an original form of functional architecture. Not a theorician, L. H. De Koninck has rooted his design in the in depth understanding of popular architecture developed by farmers on the Belgian sea shore. He spent many years copying these natural design, and maintained a deep sense of them all his life even when expressed through the most modern concepts and breakthrough use of lights and space in the 20's.
"History makers are often ignored for too long like the Californian architect Rudolf Schindler (1887-1953) whose career runs parallel to that of De Koninck; it was only during the sixties that his work was examined for the first time then discovered and eventually revealed.
It is no doubt owing to the detailed study , by the Archive of Modern Architecture in Brussels (since 1968) that De Koninck was mentioned in Michel Ragon's historical work and correctly situated in the "Visual History of Twentieth-Century architecture" in which Dennis Sharp compares the Lenglet Villa, built by De Koninck in 1926, with the houses which Gropius built in Dessau in 1925-1926 and Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright (in order to illustrate the fundamental divergence which exist between a striking illustration of European doctrinaire functionalism—closed forms, square plan, endless surfaces of the white envelope - and the stimulated spatial character of American organic architecture based upon daring plan and articulations).
"De Koninck realized some of his most notable works prior to the founding of CIAM; namely his own house (1924), Lenglet House (1926) and Haverbeke house (1927). The Lenglet house in particular rise above the usual level of functionalism. It is one of the finest examples of international architecture in the twenties, on a par with Rietved's Schroeder house (1924) and Le Corbusier's Cook house (1926), without being derivative of either De Stijl movement or the "Esprit Nouveau". Despite some evident foreign influences, it's highly original facade expresses its specific origins within the Belgian architectural tradition" De Koninck became a member of the Belgian section of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929. [Wikipedia]