Charles Vander Straeten, Palais des Académies, Brussels, 1821-28, with surrounding gardens.
Photograph: Lin Chang Chih / Wikimedia Commons

Palais des Académies, Brussels: Venue for EAHN 2012

The EAHN 2012 organizing committee is pleased to announce that the organization’s Second International Meeting will take place in the Palais des Académies, Brussels, from 31 May-3 June 2012.  (Click here for the the Call for Session and Roundtable Proposals with due date 19 December 2010.)  A leading scholar on the building, Francis Strauven (Universiteit Gent, emeritus), has generously provided us with a brief introduction to this distinguished historic venue:

The Palace of the Academies is the seat of five Belgian royal academies: two academies of science and fine arts (the French-speaking ARB and the Dutch-speaking KVAB), two academies of medicine (the French-speaking ARMB and the Dutch-speaking KAGB) and the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature (ARLLFB).*

Still, the palace was not designed as an Aedes Academiarum but as a princely residence. It was built for Prince William of Orange, the crown prince of the then Kingdom of the United Netherlands, a union of the Netherlands and Belgium which lasted from 1815 to 1830. The young prince had been an adjutant of Wellington, had distinguished himself by his heroic deeds in the English campaigns against the Napoleonic troops in Spain, and had played a crucial role in the Battle of Waterloo where Napoleon was finally defeated.  With his cheerful character, he proved in many respects to be the opposite of his father, King William I, a rather dour, frugal and calculating ruler unliked by the Belgians.

The Belgians hinted that they would prefer to be ruled by the prince rather than his father and this desire found official expression in the proposal of the Belgian States General in 1815 to build a palace for the prince in Brussels, long before considering building a Royal Palace. William I was firmly opposed to this bill, rightly understanding that the initiative was aimed at installing his son as a kind of viceroy in Brussels.  But after five years of resistance, the king eventually gave in. The project was entrusted to Charles Vander Straeten, an architect who had already built the Prince’s country house in Tervuren. The palace was designed in 1821-23, and constructed from 1823-28.

Vander Straeten, an outstanding exponent of Belgian neoclassicism, produced one of the purest buildings of the late Empire period.  Based on an axial plan, it can be considered a perfect application of J.N.L. Durand’s composition theory, but is by no means marked by Durand’s dry utilitarianism. Vander Straeten accommodated the palace to the extant classical context of the Warande city park and the adjacent Place Royale (both c. 1782), but at the same time he distinguished it in several ways. Unlike the surrounding mansions, uniformly plastered and painted white, the palace was executed entirely in natural stone and its façades articulated with an elegant Ionic order.

The prince and his family lived in the palace only one year before the Belgian revolution took place. The Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Medicine moved into the building in 1876, but in the meantime its interior had been thoroughly transformed. The palace was restored and renovated between 1969 and 1976 by the architect Simon Brigode.  Currently it is undergoing a new restoration campaign, with completion planned for early 2012 in time for the EAHN conference in spring 2012.

*The Dutch-language counterpart of the latter, the Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde (KANTL), is based in Ghent.