The new glass mammoth stands on the site of not just a car park but before that, a dog track, an ice rink, a ballroom, a covered market, a fish market and the city’s original port on the vanished river.
Many would thrive in the final years of Leopold II’s reign as the proceeds of the Congo empire flooded in, and they were the ideal market for a reinvented mode of city living focused on the picturesque.
Until the 1870s, central Brussels resembled Bruges more than a little, as we can still see from photographs and paintings of the time.
Art Nouveau was the brainchild of Belgians like Victor Horta and Paul Hankar who broke with the classical themes weighing down late 19th century architecture. The movement fell out of fashion in the 1950s, brushed away by the brute efficiency of Brusselization.
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