Willem Bekers
Willem Bekers (°1979) graduated as an architect in 2002 with the design for a museum in Glasgow (“The Museum of Ballistic Design or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”) and a typological research project on coastal defence works. Between 2004 and 2016, he was project architect at Import Export Architecture (Antwerp, Belgium), working on a wide variety of design projects, often with unconventional background or involving complex geometry. He was also responsible for projects by Import Export Architecture in collaboration with Marc Koehler Architects (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Plus Office Architects (Brussels, Belgium), and founded his own small-scale architectural practice in 2005.As from 2005, he has also been teaching at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent University. His educational practice has evolved along two axes
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In contrast to scholarly attention devoted to the rebellion in Shinkakasa, the construction phase remains somewhat underexposed. Nevertheless, the case is an interesting exception for the central African context, where construction remained largely dependent on indigenous building materials and knowhow until the 1920s. The building site of Shinkakasa demonstrates how, even in an early colonial context, a one-to-one translation of Belgian building science and technology clashes with local realities. The first (large-scale) application of concrete, the military management of the building site and the introduction of state-of-the-art equipment were all at odds with the scarcity of imported building materials, the reliance on indigenous knowhow, the difficult communication with experts in the Métropole, and the – alleged – incompetency of ‘unskilled’ black labour. In this paper we argue that the colonial building site can hardly be understood as the simple export of fully mastered building technologies ‘from the West to the Rest’. While most construction historians working on Africa have been focusing on the export of (prefabricated) building(s) technologies to the continent, a more recent interest in different actors of the construction process – in particular the Colonial Public Works Departments, private contracting companies and (still incipient) African labour – sparked a true postcolonial turn in the construction history of the non-West.
With the archives of the Congo Free State largely destroyed, picturing the building site conditions is a challenging task. Nevertheless, a series of photographs in the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa gives a surprisingly inclusive image of the realities on the building site. In particular the African labourers take up a central role in these images, all the more striking if juxtaposed to the few written testimonies of the construction site by engineers or high-ranked military personnel. While in these official reports black labourers are always reduced to ‘man-hours of unskilled labour’, several of the photographs offer a more nuanced perspective on construction in a colonial context. The case is formatted as a ‘visual essay’ in which diptychs of photographs are juxtaposed to the few written sources as to trace different tensions present on the building site.
In contrast to scholarly attention devoted to the rebellion in Shinkakasa, the construction phase remains somewhat underexposed. Nevertheless, the case is an interesting exception for the central African context, where construction remained largely dependent on indigenous building materials and knowhow until the 1920s. The building site of Shinkakasa demonstrates how, even in an early colonial context, a one-to-one translation of Belgian building science and technology clashes with local realities. The first (large-scale) application of concrete, the military management of the building site and the introduction of state-of-the-art equipment were all at odds with the scarcity of imported building materials, the reliance on indigenous knowhow, the difficult communication with experts in the Métropole, and the – alleged – incompetency of ‘unskilled’ black labour. In this paper we argue that the colonial building site can hardly be understood as the simple export of fully mastered building technologies ‘from the West to the Rest’. While most construction historians working on Africa have been focusing on the export of (prefabricated) building(s) technologies to the continent, a more recent interest in different actors of the construction process – in particular the Colonial Public Works Departments, private contracting companies and (still incipient) African labour – sparked a true postcolonial turn in the construction history of the non-West.
With the archives of the Congo Free State largely destroyed, picturing the building site conditions is a challenging task. Nevertheless, a series of photographs in the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa gives a surprisingly inclusive image of the realities on the building site. In particular the African labourers take up a central role in these images, all the more striking if juxtaposed to the few written testimonies of the construction site by engineers or high-ranked military personnel. While in these official reports black labourers are always reduced to ‘man-hours of unskilled labour’, several of the photographs offer a more nuanced perspective on construction in a colonial context. The case is formatted as a ‘visual essay’ in which diptychs of photographs are juxtaposed to the few written sources as to trace different tensions present on the building site.
This paper looks into the dialectics between science and design, by questioning the role of modernist architectural networks in the aftermath of World War I. It uses social network analysis to determine the role of what could be called ‘military design thinking’ within the circles of the Novembergruppe, the Bauhaus and (later) Der Ring. These insights are supported by the parallel stories of two of their prominent architects, Erich Mendelsohn and Ernst Neufert, who would later find themselves in opposing camps. The first, an émigré architect, acted as a consultant in the construction of a mock-up German village in the Utah desert in 1943, serving as a testing facility for the aerial bombing of German cities. The latter, through his interwar work on building standardization, became involved in German air-raid protection programs under Speer during the Second World War. On one hand, this combined case illustrates how the modern movement acted as a conductor for a scientific design approach between both world wars. On the other hand, it hints at the questionable catalyst effects of conflict to the advancements of design thinking.
The proposed paper builds upon this work and looks deeper into the operationalization of a so-called “vocabulary of the construction site” into the nationalist rhetoric of the IJzerbedevaartcomité during the annual rallies in the period 1952-65, timeframe of the IJzertoren’s reconstruction. Building cranes, site equipment, scaffolding, scale models and reinforcement bars featured prominently throughout these pilgrimages and its visual culture, indicating how the reconstruction embodied the renewed aspirations of the postwar Flemish movement. Operating on different levels, the translation of this formal language of the building site into a staged event impacted considerably on the iconography of the pilgrimages. On one hand, the construction site was used and designed as a stage, as a pulpit and as a canvas. On the other hand, successive pilgrimages centered on milestones in the construction, such as the driving of the first foundation pile, the groundbreaking ceremony or the erection of the maypole. The fetching of building materials even became the central theme of the 1955 pilgrimage. Interestingly, less important events were also celebrated and mediatized, such as the geotechnical survey or the drainage works. The paper aims to assess the impact and modus operandi of this “symbolism of reconstruction” as a metaphor for the Flemish movement’s postwar resurrection, taking advantage of the destruction of the old IJzertoren. This implies that the interplay between the monument and its commemoration is not a one-way process: nationalist ideologies bestowed the bricks and concrete of the IJzertoren with ideology, but also the other way around, since the very act of building and reconstruction fueled nationalist rhetoric.
Departing from such insights, the proposed paper looks into the troublesome relation between tourism and conflict space. More specifically, it uses the Michelin guidebook to demonstrate how the First World War is a turning point in this respect. Battlefield tourism was far from a new phenomenon in 1918, with early accounts reporting back to Waterloo and the emerging tourism industry following the American Civil War. Battlefield guides then provided assistance in making the conflict topography readable and understandable to the untrained eye of the non-military visitor. This role of the landscape, as merely being a passive backdrop for military events that were limited in time and space, changes radically during World War I. The continued stalemate of the Western Front, combined with the potential of industrialised warfare, turns temporary fieldworks into permanent spatial interventions and transforms the landscape into a space to be modified, constructed and urbanised – in short designed.
The Michelin issue on the Yser and the Belgian coast demonstrates how this is even more true for the front in the Flanders region. The guidebook sets off with a detailed survey of the geology and micro-topography of the battlefield, explaining how local conditions paved the way for an artificial landscape of inundations and solid ground-level constructions, rather than trenches and underground warfare that characterise most of the Western Front. Furthermore, it depicts the ruinscape of the front in a series of before-and-after photographs of monuments, not unlike, for instance, the image report of the Misson Dhuicque which captured the destroyed Belgian heritage between 1915 and 1918. But the Michelin guide also looks at experimental structures in reinforced concrete behind the lines, such as the submarine shelters in the port of Bruges, and places them at the same footing of the monuments in the medieval centre of the city. In doing so, the Michelin guide exemplifies a modern approach towards the artificialities of the landscape, heritage and built environment of the conflict.