– James Payne

On the north edge of Brussels city centre, the recently refurbished Gare Maritime was once Europe’s largest goods station. Located in the former industrial area known as ‘Tour & Taxis’, the vast nineteenth-century roof now shelters offices, indoor retail boulevards and enough left over space to host markets and events, such as the ‘Realty Belgium’ real estate conference.

Just outside, a new housing area of beautifully planned and detailed apartment buildings is being finished on the western flank of Gare Maritime. A product of the last developer-led boom, the precinct varies from five-storey high slabs to thirteen-storey mini-towers, set in hard landscaped gardens. Central Brussels has a gritty reputation and remains relatively untroubled by gentrification. Even though new and exciting cultural venues are appearing in the neighbourhood, the promoters have a task to try and tempt the wealthier residents of Brussels to live here, many of whom reside in the leafy western suburbs, where they enjoy a lifestyle of villas, gardens and cars. Visiting a show apartment high up in a tower with commanding views of the city, I wondered whether these really were ‘urban villas’ as the architects claim, or had the definition been stretched too far?

O.M. Ungers’ 1977 manifesto ‘Berlin – A Green Archipelago’ provides the typological, urban and theoretical basis for the definition of the ‘urban villa’ that is the focus of Dogma’s exhibition Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration at De Singel in Antwerp. According to Dogma, the urban villa is a ‘middle-size and multi-family house’ which reconciles the advantages of suburban living, with direct contact to serene outdoor gardens, but at higher densities demands a more intense and economically viable urban fabric. This rigorous and beautifully presented exhibition aims to situate Dogma’s experiments in collective living into a historical story of this somewhat elusive typology.

Ungers’ notion of occupying the overgrown gaps in the destroyed city block fabric of post-war Berlin was always somewhat romantic and even anti-urban, a way to manage or even celebrate urban decline. I imagined an elegantly dilapidated single family classical villa in a hidden arcadia, partitioned off into still generous apartments and rented cheaply. An interesting place for artists or musicians, not so much for developers.

The forty precedents that line the walls of the blue painted space at De Singel illustrate Dogma’s collection of urban villa types arranged chronologically from Roman times to the present day. Some are certainly the product of property speculation, but the curators have superimposed a somewhat forced narrative of ‘Speculation to Cooperation’—an evolution towards the new nirvana of the co-operative housing model. Drawn in an oblique cabinet projection, the precedents are depicted faithfully within their surroundings with intricately drawn facades flat to the page. Even amongst the colourful detail of gardens, trees, lawns, bushes and/or streetscapes that surround them, the architectural pedigree of the chosen artefacts is evident. Whether Roman villas, renaissance palaces, medieval burghers’ houses, nineteenth-century bourgeois residences, Milanese condominia or contemporary cooperative housing, each retains a discrete architectural figure and language. But the relationship of ‘villa’ to what may constitute ‘garden’ remains in each tableau and can be more or less compelling—or tenuous.

The flattened effect of these drawings prioritises the architectural composition over the topography. One example in Lausanne evoked a shock of recognition from my own experience: Henri-Robert Von der Mühll’s early modernist La Chandoline from 1933, perhaps the perfect example of an urban villa. The drawing shows a jaunty array of projecting yellow shades over the south-facing balconies, and crucially the five stories with penthouse is in touching distance of the height of the mature pine tree on the eastern side. A quick check on Google Maps 3D view shows the tree is there but the less than elegant contemporary apartment building next door has been removed in the drawing, one assumes to preserve the context of 1933. The projected view is upslope to the main facade, and therefore the most powerful experience of place is absent, the view down the hill over Lac Leman to the French Alps beyond.

These 3D drawings are compelling in their detail, whilst their garish colours and digital textures evoke city planning video games of the 1990s such as ‘Sim City’—one wonders if the images are composed drawings, or screenshots from a larger, continuous 3D landscape of speculation. 1:100 plans below chart the evolution of the domestic arrangements of the chosen precedents, with progressively smaller rooms and more complex plans. The selection of historical urban villas does not feel definitive, in architectural, geographical or historic terms. At some point there is a kind of ‘mission creep’ from the strictly architectural definition of the typology to the social and political design intentions of the precedents. Perhaps it is the aspect of time and the ebbing flows of rich and poor through these buildings and their city quarters that is missing. After all, squat movements or artistic occupations, whether in New York in the 70s, London in the 1980s, Geneva or Berlin in the 90s, were actually responsible for occupying and saving old and previously ‘respectable’ urban apartment buildings.

The communality of radical collective living in these examples often came from a spirit of improvisation and occupation of space by the inhabitants, not from architects’ designs. I would argue that the more purpose-designed space of the Fourierist Phalanstery—or the enforced collectivism of the proto-Soviet social condenser is quite a different typology altogether than the ‘urban villa’.

Two long tables in the middle of the space showcase Dogma’s own take on the urban villa. One table of site models and large-scale portfolios is of urban scale proposals for affordable housing to densify areas of Antwerp. This ‘urban editing’ occurs in mid-twentieth century housing areas within their surrounding parkland, a context of more reminiscent of the large-scale urban planning of Hilberseimer than the more recent messy bricolage of contemporary Flemish urbanism.

The other table shows more detailed prototypes in other locations from Dogma’s recent oeuvre of paper projects of social and collective living. Here the typology being explored is most closely allied to Unger’s ‘House without Qualities’ from 1995. The stripped-back classicism of the upright French window favoured by Perret features here, in combination with variations of grid plans of enfilade rooms. The only somewhat thrilling exception to this rule is the Corbusian ‘Faux Corbu’ in Tunisia with the ‘Fenêtre-en-longeur’ and free plan explored in an especially seductive 1:50 model. The other projects are variations on a theme, mostly of CLT (Cross-Laminated-Timber) construction whilst the urban-scale projects make use of a different kind of CLT (Community Land Trusts) to try and break the logic of speculative development that had actually done so much to inform the evolution of the urban villa in the historical record on the walls. All the large-scale portfolios are illustrated with Dogma’s trademark perspective ‘vignettes’—a method of representation critically distanced from the photorealistic render. These can offer tantalising glimpses of informal moments, or more staged scenes closer to a pastel-hued Wes Anderson film set. 

On the end walls are two videos, the first of which explores the quiet atmosphere of typically ‘urban villa’ areas on the periphery of cities such as Zurich and Milan, a condition of elegant and discrete living within a collective urban context that can host many different modes of living. The second video brings a political, policy and academic perspective to the question of housing provision in Antwerp and Flanders, which has a surprisingly low percentage of social housing. Is the urban villa the solution here? It could be, but the architectural and political arguments do not quite coalesce in this thought-provoking exhibition.

James Payne is a director of Lundvall Payne, currently working on a large-scale urban project in Sweden. The practice is also working on a research project titled ‘Territorial Typologies’ on the post war housing areas of Stockholm, based on design studio research at KTH Stockholm and London Metropolitan University.

Dogma: Urban Villa is on show at De Singel, Antwerp, until 9 February 2025.