You will want to pay close attention to ambient detail in this city’s built environment – it is unparalleled outside Flanders – the angular features of its skyline, the irregular shapes of its squares, the animated presence of its Renaissance buildings. If those don’t convince you, the sculptural surfaces of exteriors lining Leysstraat or the far end of Meir closest to the ring, and the gilded and polychromatic accents of its Centraal Station will decisively dispel any doubts. Plaster, a high maintenance imitation finish no sane person stops to think about, is a rarity in the Antwerp of the period – Austrian rule in he 18th century an exception when plaster was used to ennoble its traditional Flemish facades – instead, solid sandstone and brickwork lining central streets and squares give the city its distinctive, enduring, and distinguished look. Paris, Vienna and Lisbon may be unsurpassed in sculpture, its quality of execution, whether ecclesiastic or secular, marble or bronze, but this mastery came later. And even the best of Italian carving – ok, fair, Rome aside – expressive and perfect in its form as it may be, appears somewhat sketchy and tentative in comparison, and not exactly a match to the precision of Netherlandish guilds. The lightness of drapery folds, the gracefulness hanging fabric, lace detail, meticulously executed in carved stone, need to be seen up close.
It hides much of this detail well – in a typical Antwerpian fashion – so you need to do some walking. Even better, Antwerp, with its compact geometry, informal and fluid topology, and small interconnected open spaces, is highly walkable. On your walk you will encounter architecture of highly nuanced execution – this should make for a nice contrast with the quiet, easy going, even plain character of its back streets. This place is young, full of life, effortlessly artsy, and doesn’t seem to carry itself too seriously. In the Old Town, loosely defined as everything S and W of Sint-Paulusstraat and St Charles Borromeo church, cosy squares filled with outdoor terraces and narrow lanes lined with boutiques merge into a single pedestrian zone. The New Town, the city’s larger core, spanning the entire length of Meir and Leysstraat to the Flemish Opera and Stadspark, is perfectly suited for aimless and directionless walks, thanks to its busy streets inhabited by eclectic storefronts and traversed by curving narrow gauge tracks of old trams. Just remember to punctuate your walk by frequent stops – to take in a beverage, catch a taste of the urban scene unfolding next to you, or simply assess the inventory of of the city bold expansion of the 1540s under van Schoonbeke, it is still inescapable. Antwerp’s central nooks and crannies offer a change of pace, its interior courtyards and hidden 1590’s vintage mid-block lanes are not to be missed. Vlayekensgang, Vlaaikensgang, the oldest remaining cobbled alleys in the city, saved from bulldozer and restored during the brave and ignorant 1960’s, are accessible only through unassuming portals from larger Hoogstraat, Oude Koornmarkt, and Pelgrimsstraat streets are truly unique, bring a flavor of chic central living and an occasional quaint restaurant, their impeccable cobblestones, painted brick and ivy facades are worth a look. Best explored in a caffeinated, beer-infused mood.
Multiple artistic influences layered over time peacefully coexist here, with no apparent tension. Many cities display ostentatious Baroque of the Counter Reformation, some also offer clean lines of the Renaissance, others still retain a skyline of Gothic spires – Antwerp comfortably wears all three, Renaissance and Reformation – built on strong ties with Italian bankers, traders, artists and the Spanish crown – meets very advanced indigenous High Gothic. Europe’s melting pot in its Golden Age, it was a Catholic metropolis, full of contradictions, brewing with centrifugal forces. On a historical fault line between Catholicism and Reformation, between traditional, loyalist, decadent South and breakaway, efficient North. Between Empire and the self-governing city whose council often overruled Imperial authority and cast a longer shadow than the surrounding duchy. A city with a split personality, well-managed and at peace with itself.
Renaissance and Art Nouveau at eye level, Baroque at close range, its skyline convincingly dominated by the Gothic bell tower and steeples of the 16th century Cathedral of Our Lady. Grote Markt‘s Stadthuis, a trendsetter among city halls and the region’s first truly Renaissance structure, was added in the 1560’s – relatively late, too close to the onset of Baroque yet under too much lingering pressure from the techniques of still pervasive Flemish Gothic to compete with pure and elegant but relatively austere Italian Renaissance structures – an eclectic mixture of styles typical of Flanders of that time. A UNESCO World Heritage site by itself, from the heavily decorated mayor’s chambers to the perfectly symmetrical exterior energized by 87 multicolor flags. The diversity of structures and styles has helped create a vibrant housing market with a range of units, from working class local to old world continental to open NYC or London style lofts. But those remain hidden from view, what is open to idle observer is the sheer number of small building lots that make up the city’s urban fabric.
Everyday burgher houses here are of enviable quality, despite their quantity. Discount if you want the Antwerp’s sheer number of houses – gabled, narrow, with steep stairs, and therefore puny and undersized – and with the benefit of hindsight of later centuries, a far cry from the palazzi and hotels particuliers of Italy and France, surely a larger number of such houses would be expected to fill the space. Yet Gothic and early Renaissance Brabant, with some of the tallest, richest, and best-built town residences and guild halls anywhere, has no good comparable and no real analog anywhere – if you stay honest with yourself, keep it apples to apples, and filter out of contention the aristocratic palatial residences of other cities. In most cities of Western Europe private dwellings were simply not designed to last centuries – look no further than the overpopulated London or Paris of the time – a burgher house of the period is either a barely extant embarrassment hidden from sight or long gone on account of poor quality, decay, and redevelopment. In places where regular premises were in fact built to last as long as public edifices – like Stockholm, the Hanseatic league, or free German and Central European cities then under Magdeburg or similar self-governance laws – with all due respect to their master builders’ achievement, their version of this type of burgher dwelling is simply no match to its counterparts in Antwerp and the surrounding province.
This Art City is not a city museum, and no one promised you the uniformly of Paris or Prague in Antwerp. Narrow facades and small lots imply more houses by count – add the air raids and activist postwar development – naturally some of buildings must be plain. Plain but not offensively so, just watch out for nondescript prewar low-rise blocks and a few outright postwar high-rise monstrosities scattered around. Preservation of heritage did not always mean respect for the city’s historic building fabric or restrictions on new build height, otherwise we would have been spared the ugliness of towers that popped up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the decades when looking back wasn’t considered cool. Generally, street elevations of behind-the-scenes Antwerp outside the historic center are either of uneven height, limited to three stories, or mercilessly contaminated by shameless, utilitarian postwar blocks. That being said, an inquisitive person will be mostly occupied with the detail at eye level, of beautiful people, cool signage, groovy shops, tasty consumables, eye catching terraces, and there is enough here to excuse the uneven building height, the inconsistent scale, or occasional absence of detail. With plenty of real jewels to admire in this dense city, a brief pause in ornament here and there offers a welcome chance to give your eyes – and camera lens – a short break. Until the next turn serves up another eccentric concoction of gilded finials, gabled skyline, casual cafe terraces, cobblestones, and fashionable locals, sending your mind and viewfinder on a new adventure with light and shadow, space and time.
I would be careful about bird’s-eye views in highly fragmented places with lots of granular detail. Belgian cities is where small is beautiful, especially those with multiple functional uses like Antwerp. This is not St. Petersburg, Paris, or Vienna, and not Barcelona or Budapest – shaped by the industrial age land grab and centrally planned in a regulated, top down way, where street elevations were sanctioned, standardized, and dimensioned according to the old regime plans and state commissions’ protocols. There was no such catalyst to master redevelopment of 19th century Antwerp, no new thoroughfares pierced through the city to form regular geometric patterns. No master plan existed as such in the pre-modern age, and even Europe’s most affluent and populous self-governing cities of Flanders and Brabant were not laid out to a central blueprint, instead they formed over time. This doesn’t mean however, that building plans, elevations, and skyline features were random, surely binding constraints were applied – deliberate placement and proximity of other structures, a sense of proportions, height to width ratio – when sizing and designing individual private dwellings and public edifices. This gabled city, despite its proportions of a pre-modern metropolis, was never meant to be read this way, all at once, and by disrespecting the unplanned city planners’ original intent a viewer surely risks disappointment and misplaced aggravation. Luckily, density and short perspectives conspire to hide an occasional eyesore – KBC Tower of 1931, then Europe’s tallest building, does not need to be one of them – from many viewpoints.
A wide and unobstructed viewing angle from distant points tends not to do Antwerp justice – avoid jumping to conclusions on its skyline after a visit to Museum aan de Stroom, it’s roof deck is too distant – a better view of the city unfolds from inside the museum, through a curtain wall of corrugated glass, its alternating concave and convex surfaces breaking up the view into finite vertical bands. And even the nearby port and quickly gentrifying nearby area are better explored from the water or from street level. Do yourself a favor and position yourself instead directly over a narrowly framed set of gabled roofs lining the perimeter of its central squares and courtyards. The skyline of central Antwerp should not be wide open to effortless viewing – to avoid catching predictable collateral effects of postwar reconstruction and in the interests of maximizing one’s positive emotions, choose a viewing platform that makes Antwerp open itself up gradually, one self-contained fragment at a time. Look for an aerial view that only comes together after deliberate staring at identifiable landmarks and open spaces, one that requires mentally tracing the curvature familiar mostly form street level, and is only recognizable after the dots of major corner domes, turrets, and volutes are connected, after some trial and error.
This viewing preference extends to pedestrian exploration. Not to sound medievalist – but burgher houses, Gothic and Baroque churches, and the Italianate town hall were created within the enclosed envelope of a limited viewing frame, their three dimensional effect would not survive if the spatial constraints marked by irregular footprint of adjacent city blocks or neighboring structures were to be removed, arbitrarily expanding open space to reflect changing fashions or traffic needs of later centuries. Large open spaces may be accretive to palatial horizontality of long neoclassical facades but tend to unnecessarily compromise delicate, elaborately designed older buildings with too much advance viewing notice. Grotemarkt and nearby landlocked squares are cozier and offer a more comforting viewing stage than a glance across Groenplaats, disrespectful of the diminutive size of building elevations overlooking it. This disproportionately large empty space dwarfs the Rubens monument in its center and the distinguished facade of Hilton, built as Grand Bazaar department store at the turn of the 20th century by Victor Horta, an architect synonymous with Europe’s most original and accomplished Art Nouveau school. Similarly, facades along the Scheldt waterfront are better observed narrowly from across the street than from the opposite bank of the river accessed by a pedestrian tunnel. And even Antwerp’s masterfully sculpted Cathedral of Our Lady, with its more than respectable dimensions of Europe’s second largest parish church – seven aisles wide and with one of Europe’s tallest belfries that houses a carillon of 47 bells and to this day Antwerp’s tallest structure – was designed, proportioned, built, and had its lace work of stone detailed, to be observed in awe from close up, at a limited distance consistent with the scale of the 14th-16th century city in mind. Although I admit, a view of the Cathedral, easily the city’s most ornate silhouette, down Suikerrui from the waterfront some distance away reads quite well too.
A city is where positive volumes of designed objects dominate over negative space, countryside – the opposite. Disproportionately generous open space is the urban enemy number 1. A wide open square, uninterrupted by a tree line or a garden, an overly broad street, unsupported by a building envelope of sufficient height, becomes such negative space, a void. Open space demands respect and precision or risks leaving a bad taste – it must be managed, framed, captured, arrested if needed, similar to an oversized person’s belly and thighs that – we all agree – are better covered up by flattering clothes than in plain view. Is this not what Camillo Sitte, Vienna’s controversial urban planner of the late 1800’s, criticized in the as-built Ringstrasse, is this not why Otto Wagner, Vienna’s Chief Architect in the early 1900’s and absolute genius of the niche between city space and the building surface, disagreed with Viollet-le-Duc’s theorizing half a century earlier? Only my analogy is less abstract and in plain(er) English than the original. Urban planning theorists and architects have a mixed record of success with this space management, and no individual contributor of the past had lasting control over how the object vs space would be read in the future. But you have such control when navigating, talking pictures, observing – over your choice of angle and distance – whether through the viewfinder of your camera or through the viewing frame of your eye.
In less graphic terms, Antwerp’s center is like a chamber music piece in harmony with the small concert venue – let’s not introduce a stage sized for a symphony orchestra, even if we think chamber style peaked a long time ago.
