Antoine Pompe. Architects'Journeys

Architects’ Journeys is a collection of monographs on architects who left their mark on the built landscape of Brussels after the First World War. The collection focuses on the output of architects whose work is less well known, but their intimate relationships with the city make this survey all the more worthwhile. Each volume highlights a singular career path, both factually and figuratively, revealing the built heritage as well as the little-known and little-studied facets of the capital’s urban history.

This volume devoted to Antoine Pompe (1873–1980) rediscovers the original work and thinking of a central, independent figure in the birth of modern architecture in Belgium. One of his first projects, Dr Maurice Van Neck’s orthopaedic clinic in Saint-Gilles (1910), was one of the most innovative buildings of its time. For 15 years, Pompe was involved in the work of the avant-garde, notably in the garden city movement. Despite his concern to build economically with sober, rational forms, he refused to abandon his interest in the emotional dimension of buildings, and he distanced himself from the purist aesthetics of the modern movement. He thus pursued the development of an ‘architecture of reason and feeling’.