The Creation of Space and the Connection between Models and Drawings as Design Tools
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Book Series
Architectural Crossroads, vol. 11
- Pages: approx. 224 p.
- Size:220 x 300 mm
- Illustrations:176 col., 1 maps b/w
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2025
- € 75,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61286-7
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Jan/25)
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61287-4
- E-book
- Forthcoming
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Touring Belgium explores how the printed media occasioned by modern tourism described, reproduced and consecrated not only historical buildings, towns and villages but also railroads, coal mines and factories as a seemingly coherent Belgian ‘patrimony’, enmeshed in political, archaeological and cultural realities.
Subject(s)
BIO
Maarten Delbeke holds the Chair of the History and Theory of Architecture at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He has published widely on baroque architecture and art in Rome, France and the Southern Netherlands; on theoretical questions in 18th- and 19th-century European architecture; and on the reception of early modern architecture in the 20th century. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the EAHN open-access journal Architectural Histories.
Maarten Liefooghe is Associate Professor in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture at Ghent University. He has published on the architecture and the museography of 19th- and 20th-century artist museums; on early 20th-century and contemporary heritage theories, discourses and practices; and on architecture exhibitions, architecture competitions and other aspects of architecture culture. He is a member of the editorial board of OASE Journal for Architecture.
Summary
Presenting a wide range of printed media, from travel guides and collected travel letters to albums, picture postcards to bibliographies and war-time propaganda, Touring Belgium studies how in the period from Belgian independence until the wake of World War I, the print culture generated in response to changing forms of travel and tourism was crucial in establishing a national architectural heritage. In richly illustrated essays, eight historians of art and architecture each focus on one main publication, which is discussed in relation to a dazzling background of nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultural discourses, revolutions in image reproduction, and institutional management of heritage.
The core publications are partially reproduced as material objects in the book. They bring into view a nascent patrimony that includes gothic town halls and dead cities as well as modern factories and train infrastructure – what threatens or enshrines heritage are often barely distinguishable modern realities. Writers like Karl Schnaase and Victor Hugo, museum conservators like Antoine Schayes and Kervyn de Lettenhove, symbolist painters like Hannotiau and innovative lithographers like Simonau, publishers like Géruzet or the Touring club de Belgique all bring their concerns to bear on what they see as Belgian heritage. Through these preoccupations with patrimony, Belgium is crafted as a nation with a history, and as a European crossroads – historic architecture becomes a reality embedded in its territory as much as it is fabricated in print.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Aspects of Print Culture, Heritage, and Tourism in Belgium, 1830-1920 – Maarten Delbeke and Maarten Liefooghe
1. Karl Schnaase’s Niederländische Briefe (1834). An Art Historical Journey through the Low Countries in the Year of the Belgian Revolution – Henrik Karge
2. Printing and Collecting Architectural History in Belgium (1830-1860). Antoine Schayes and “L’archéologie nationale” – Ellen Van Impe
3. Composite Belgium. The Guide du touriste en Belgique of 1845 and French Travel Writing in the First Two Decades of Belgian Independence – Maarten Delbeke
4. Prospects of Belgique Industrielle (1855): a Picturesque Garden as Production Facility – David Peleman
CATALOG – Beatriz Van Houtte Alonso
5. Alexandre Hannotiau’s Picture Postcard Series A Bruges (1900): Between Symbolism and the Picturesque – Stefan Huyghebaert
6. Tourists in the Restoration Debate: a Cyclist’s Bibliography (1903) of Belgian Heritage by the Touring Club de Belgique – Jasper Van Parys
7. Outcry over Belgium, Vandalized Museum. Henri Kervyn de Lettenhove’s La guerre et les œuvres d’art en Belgique (1917) – Maarten Liefooghe
8. Michelin’s Illustrated Guide to the Battlefields of the Yser and the Belgian coast (1920): Guidebook, Field Manual, or Architectural Compendium? – Willem Bekers
Bibliography
Index
Colophon
