Le Logis and Floréal: The houses were intended to be ‘humble and enriched by vegetation’. They are just that

The details are what make Le Logis and Floréal in the suburbs of Brussels the most charming garden city in the world. The houses were intended to be, according to architect Jean-Jules Eggericx, ‘humble and enriched by vegetation’. They are just that. Virginia creeper, wisteria and climbing roses roam everywhere. Lime trees extend the façades of houses. Eggericx used a catalogue of clever details he’d lifted from housing projects in England, Belgium and the Netherlands to enrich his compact homes: bay windows, shutters and dormers, all trimmed in yellow (in Floreal) or green to give the buildings variety and personality.

Eggericx was ready for the housing crisis that followed the First World War in his devastated homeland. Although the Belgian government-in-exile was based in Le Havre during the war, the department dedicated to rebuilding the country was based in England, where it was heavily influenced by the evolving principles of the garden city being developed here. Even as Belgium was being blown to bits, members of the Office of Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions pored over plans of Welwyn Garden City and photographed the narrow vennels and small greens between houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

What sets Le Logis and Floréal apart is not just the ingenuity of the wider plan and its social ambition, but the way planning, architecture and daily life were consciously intertwined. In 1919, the Belgian government founded the Société Nationale des Habitations et Logements, which co-ordinated and supported local co-operatives with long term loans at reduced rates. Land became available in Watermael-Boitsfort in the south east of Brussels when the young wife of the late landowner Edmond Parmentier scotched rumour she was a gold-digger by gifting the bulk of her fortune to charitable causes, including the offer of land for this pioneering new suburb at relatively cheap rates.

In October 1921 the employees of a popular bank gathered together to build Le Logis, followed in March 1922 by a group of typesetters who formed a co-operative to create Floréal, named after the eighth month in the French Republican calendar. As Nathalie de Wergifosse, inhabitant, champion and tour guide of these pioneering urban expansions, explains, Le Logis is more homogeneous, while Floréal is ‘more interesting because you have more varieties of housing,’ partly due to the involvement of multiple architects. Different housing types — bungalows, family houses, duplexes, and flats — are mixed deliberately, reflecting the principle that ‘all the models were created to be able to be mixed together’. This avoided monotony while maintaining coherence.

The way in which the developments relate to the landscape is another key element of their unique power to impress the visitor. Town planner Louis Van der Swaelmen designed streets that followed the terrain and even rainwater flow, adapting to Floréal’s hilly ground while a structured and geometric plan takes advantage of Le Logis’s plateau. As de Wergifosse says, ‘the fusion between landscape and architecture is really important.’ Curving streets, terraces, tree-lined avenues, and small vennels create a network of routes that suit human needs, but also their desire for variety and intimacy.

Of course, many countries built garden cities in that small window when adherents of the Arts-and-Crafts movement struggled to deal with the demands of population increases, but before the rise of Modernism. At Betondorp, the Dutch built a rationalist Miami to the south of Amsterdam in the 1920s, volumetrically ingenious, but austere and lacking convivial public spaces. Zlin in Czechia was begun at this time. A company town for the Bata shoe manufacturer, it was built with Ebenezer Howard’s concept at its core. (The ingenious idea of pooling the increase in land prices as the town developed to mutual benefit was invariably extracted from Howard’s proposal abroad and in England.)

However, no-one built anything as brilliantly planned and sensitively executed as the twin settlements of Le Logis and Floréal.