ABSTRACT
Victor Bourgeois, architect, urbanist, teacher and founding member of the CIAM, was a key figure in Belgian modernism. In the beginning of the 1930s, Belgium was severely affected by the Great Depression. Unemployment and the lowering of living conditions became major political topics while social tensions were exacerbated, leading to violent movement of strikes. Bourgeois’s projects were developed in close relationship with this double discourse in which leisure was presented as a hygiene-oriented social claim. Bourgeois got involved by designing a master plan for 12 ‘playgrounds’ or recreational areas. Bourgeois’s projects could then be seen as heroic ones, embodying social vocation, landscape quality and even the promise to reconcile the society with the machinist era and its influence on the environment. Bourgeois tried to emphasise the industrial past and the romantic decor of the site by re-using the old lime kiln as backstage for the theatre.
