ABSTRACT
The Institut des Dames de Berlaymont is one of the oldest and most prestigious boarding schools in Brussels, originally attracting girls from the noble and higher classes. During its 400-year history, the school relocated no less than four times within what was then the urban outskirts. The most recent transfer occurred in 1962 when the community moved into a vast new campus in Waterloo. This chapter explores this last relocation of the Berlaymont institute, which happened at a moment when fundamental changes occurred within the field of education, religion and architectural culture in Belgium. We will show how the move to Waterloo and the choice for a radically modern architectural concept formed part of a deliberate strategy by the nuns to secure the position of their institute within the rapidly changing social and cultural climate in the aftermath of the 1958 World Fair. Whereas from a stylistic and typological point of view, the new buildings suggested a clean break with the past, we argue that they constituted in fact a logical step in an ongoing process of relocation and design geared at maximizing the community’s autonomy vis-à-vis the urban society it relied on.
