Description

After building the renown Familistère of Guise between 1858 and 1883, Godin built another – smaller – apartment building in Brussels, by the canal, at the end of the 19th century. On a four-hectare site, the project consisted of a cast-iron stove factory, production halls, caretaker’s dwelling, offices, a showroom for the factory’s products, and a collective housing building. This building features a rectangular plan with an inner courtyard covered by a glass roof. At the corners of the building there are two large communal stairwells and shared toilets.

The staircases lead to a perimeter gallery on each floor, which serves 72 dwellings of two, four, and five rooms. After a small hallway, the standard dwellings include two or three rooms of identical size, opening either onto the inner courtyard or the outside. These main rooms are complemented by two smaller service rooms. The entire building rests on large vaulted cellars. The attic is served by a peripheral corridor connected to the staircases.

The four-storey building is made of red bricks under a continuous tiled gable roof. It has pilasters at its corners and a central projecting bay on the canal side where the entrance is located. A blue-limestone base supports the building. Today, only the housing building remains, as the stove-production structures were demolished to make way for a shopping centre.

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Originally published in: Gérald Ledent, Alessandro Porotto, Brussels Housing. Atlas of Residential Building Types, Birkhäuser, 2023.