Parts of this eclectic city will take your breath away, albeit not in the dignified way of, say, the Grand Place in Brussels. Even Grote Markt, Antwerp’s main square – its buildings topped by gilded statues like on the Brussels square but taller, more muscular, more burgher and patrician than regal, and built a century earlier – somewhat pales in comparison with Europe’s most elegant square. Although its jagged late Gothic accents and asymmetric footprint add a picturesque, informal quality its more fully enclosed, more refined, and more perfectly complete Brussels namesake lacks. And relatively plain mid-block facades of side streets do not detract from the scene, presenting instead a blank canvas – a rarity in the heavily detailed, saturated, and otherwise complete historic center of Antwerp – for the city’s present day signage and storefront designers.
Antwerp’s masterfully crafted guild houses of the 1500’s feature more extensive glazing – of plain or painted glass variety, framed by thin mullions, that largely skips solid wall pilasters in between, covering nearly the entire surface area of their facades. Turning inside out the old cliche ‘eyes are the window to the soul,’ windows must be the eyes of the building – serving to maximize the amount of light brought into its tall and narrow interiors but also reflecting its character. Antwerp’s guild house elevations may be the real medieval precursor of today’s curtain wall – their lightness and intrinsic luminosity neutralizing their massive, towering enclosure, helping the facades connect with the eye level scene below. Where wall surfaces were not completely elbowed out by the windows and made it through, the facade elevations are pure lace – a medium perfected here in Flanders around the same time – handmade but carved out of exposed brick, framed by white sandstone, all in harmony with proportions of the underlying cobblestone lanes.
I don’t know many analogs to Meir, its architectonic buildup is something one expects to find in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, or Barcelona and Madrid. To be more specific, it is Leysstraat, Meir‘s grand Neo-Baroque extension – constructed, once the 16th century Spanish wall was demolished – linking the boulevard with Teniersplaats and Flanders Opera across the ring, and with De Keyserlei, the main axis leading from the Centraal Station. Antwerp’s former aristocratic address, turned into a pedestrian strip 25 years ago, makes a clear statement: this city is not all cozy streets and low rise buildings, there is also a different Antwerp, one worthy of comparisons with the best of what Europe 1900 had to offer.
Monumental scale and nuance, generous height and complex detail are in perfect harmony, a combination not easily achieved – even if this exceptionally elegant pedestrian mall seems to rise abruptly out of the nothingness of the ring and disappear into the generic chaos of the old town maze, its source and sink obscure. The promenade’s reason to exist is clear, but why here, almost lost in this part of central Antwerp? Bold skyline features of Leysstraat‘s imposing corners trace only tentative references to the domes of Suikerrui and Centraal Station at some distance outside its far ends, the boulevard’s historicist mid-block elevations vaguely suggest continuity with the guild houses of Grote Markt. Out of place or not, Meir and especially Leystraat form an architectural gallery of sorts, framed by two uncharacteristically tall continuous walls of richly articulated sandstone and limestone facades, crowned by domes, turrets, dormers, its gilded accents a signature mark of turn-of-the-century Antwerp. Eclectic statuary and Belle Epoque detail above do not overwhelm but – when interrogated by an inquisitive traveler in search of a familiar reference – do not disappoint. Sorting through these skyline features makes one wonder what views might open up from inside the offices and classic apartments above, but with one’s head up high it is too easy to overlook quality art at the street level, including two monuments to Antwerp’s early 17th century royal painters – a stone statue of Van Dyck and a bronze of David Teniers – at each end of the imposing Leysstraat block.
Despite infinite Instagram worthiness and architectural merit, Meir and Leysstraat are known mostly for their shopping – Meir is the most expensive retail real estate in the Benelux and hosts mainly international brands, big chains and department stores – although the eclecticist Standsfeestzaal, built in 1908 as a festival hall by Van Mechelen and revived as a luxury shopping arcade under an impressive vaulted ceiling, surely softens the insult. Its curving exterior colonnade is centered on an empty gilded niche placed above its busy entrance door – the focal point of the entire building elevation – gold leaf assertively used in lieu of plaster over its entire concave surface, conspicuously obviating the need to add a customary statue, and conclusively elevating exquisitely designed negative space above positive form. Most local designer stores and curious vintage boutiques – and best people watching scene – are elsewhere, along the pedestrian streets to the South and West. But this beautifully renovated stretch of Meir–Leysstraat is still unrivaled as a grand, if not jaw dropping, gateway to central Antwerp. One handsome Neoclassical facade not to be overlooked is that of the Vlaamse Opera built in 1907 – just across Tenierplaats and half a block to one side, and left behind, unnoticed, as one enters Leysstraat in the direction of Meir – it stands alone in the wasteland of Frankrijklei, the ring road, frozen in anticipation of distinguished facades of future developments that never came. Instead, the stately building is literally dwarfed by Antwerp Tower, the city’s tallest and, little doubt, ugliest – and if not ugliest, most offensively sited – of the mid-1970s’ residential monstrosities. Antwerp deserves better – crop out the blandness of the faceless tower and utilitarian ring road as you position your mental viewfinder in search of a memorable composition.
National Bank of Belgium, a building-island, a city block by itself, an illustration of the city’s caliber and ambition. More a Loire Chateaux than office building, it was indeed inspired by Chateau de Chambord, one of France’s most iconic and architectonically coherent Renaissance castles – and like many banks it has an impressive collection now available for public viewing. Built in the 1870’s by Hendrik Beyaert, one of Belgium’s top official architects famously influenced by earlier medievalist theorizing of Violet-le-Duc and by the pomp of the building boom of Second Empire Paris, this edifice rises to the top of the list of Europe’s most imposing historicist creations. Its location on Frankrijklei, a stretch of the ring road that encircles the city center, opposite Van Eycklei and the SW corner of the perfectly triangular Stadspark, is quite convenient – as a destination or a highlight on the way to the park, the diamond district, the Centraal Station and the Zoo, or to Zurenborg. The ring road is too wide, lined with an incoherent mix of dignified old world structures – like prestigious and centuries old Onze-Lieve-Vrouwecollege school founded by the Jesuits in 1575 and expanded nearly three centuries later and visible from Franrijklei, from the parallel Rubenslei ring, from the Stadspark across, and from Louiza-Marialei green square in between – and nondescript 8-10 story buildings only slightly softer and more continental than the post war high rises on NYC’s Upper East Side. Perhaps this is why long segments of the ring road are planted with trees, as if trying to shield pedestrians from the blandness of this highway and of facades across the road. Not so in the immediate area of the National Bank of Belgium, no trees here to block the sight of this castle of an office block – on the contrary, its four story Neo-Renaissance elevations, crowned with massive mansard roof sections, its corner towers, domes, spires, and rows of dormers, and chimneys along its sides remain in full and unobstructed view – whether from Stadspark or from the lesser streets facing the center and flanking the building’s sides, or form across the Leopoldplaats on which these side streets converge.
Centraal Station is equally unmatched, King Leopold II’s project is not called Railway Cathedral for nothing. Cathedral, castle, or palace – the appropriate monument class worthy of comparison is unclear – when a public transportation hub is a work of art it becomes a destination in its own right, just make sure you plan to arrive by train – for the stations’s eye candy interiors and the right way to enter this city. The birthplace and pinnacle of the railroad age is London, each of its 18 railway stations of the 19th century still a buzzing terminus full of signage and fast-paced action, still injecting the British capital with commuters from all angles with total disregard of the fact that long-distance train travel into London from the British Isles is an oxymoron. Antwerp’s station instead had to assert itself on the cityscape strategically, from a single site. Antwerp’s railroad terminus doesn’t have the on premise hotels of London’s great Victorian stations, and lacks the commotion and Belle Epoque grandeur of Gare du Nord, Gare St Lazare or Gare de Lyon in Paris. It has many 19th century Continental European rivals – from slightly older Budapest Nyugati built by Eiffel, Madrid’s Atotcha, and Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, Europe’s largest, to Leipzig, Dresden, Frankfurt, Cologne – can each leave the visitor in awe of their multiple train shed spans and renovated facades. But in the age when Italian train stations are mostly from the fascist era and nothing to look at, including Rome’s Termini, and when Vienna can thank the Allied bombing for losing every one of its imposing historic train stations – Kaiser-Franz-Josesf-Bahnhof, Westbahnof, Sudbahnhof, Mitte – to highly functional but dreadfully modern compounds, Antwerp’s restored and recently expanded monument to the railroad age, and to the city’s Golden Age, leaves a lasting impression from within, an unmistakable street perspective and skyline presence from the outside, and generally a lot to be thankful for.
This edifice of unfathomable harmony is by Louis Delacenserie, a talented neoclassical architect and a native of Bruges – thankfully, he was not swept into his city’s bitter old rivalry with Antwerp – is a great place to explore, even if you are not arriving or departing by train, perhaps especially if you are not. In its extravagant, marble-clad atrium, Neo-Renaissance layout and masonry structure organically blend with Art Nouveau wrought iron mullions of its arch windows. Elegant tiered arcades are nested inside the soffits of its immense vaulted ceilings, inside the spandrels of its load bearing mega arches, in turn supporting arched mullions of curtain wall windows on each of the four sides of its giant, 75 meter high dome towering above the waiting hall. This arch pattern is repeated again along the rail tracks in a long line of latticed full-height arch windows, in their articulated lunette vault intersections with the translucent train shed roof, and in the structural arches framing its main transverse span. The station’s monumental dimensions and sweeping surfaces easily broken down into a rhythm of well-proportioned patterns that seem almost human scale, thanks to this nuanced geometry, by the 20 colors of marble used, and by Antwerp’s signature gilded bronze accents. It is a relief that the framing of the 185 meter long train shed glass roof is relatively simple, no latticework of wrought iron trussed arches here, just thin circular arcs tracing the axes of the single, 44 meter high arch span.
The grand five tier building is special – for its classical yet eclectic design, and for not letting the utilitarian, the practical take over completely – but this nearly 400 meter long station is highly functional, accommodating trains at its 14 tracks and four different levels of platforms, an ingenious addition during recent renovation carried out to convert the classic Western European terminus into a through station accommodating high speed Paris-Amsterdam trains. The successful renovation helped unite – visually and functionally – disparate and previously divided neighborhoods of the city, something to which any great transportation project should aspire. Exit onto one of the main city axes, your back facing the historic zoo, filled with appropriately neoclassical structures. Proceed down de Keyserlei towards the Scheldt in the distance, past the edge of the Diamond District, the triangular Stadspark on far left. The scale and density will change as you move deeper in, towards Leysstraat, that uniquely ornate tributary to Meir, the last mile on the way to Antwerp’s medieval core. But before you leave the station, don’t ignore its Royal Cafe – more grand banking hall than cafe, its ceiling detail worthy of quick comparison with Belle Epoque interiors of Gare de Lyon’s Le Train Bleu, it certainly lives up to the Railway Cathedral status.
