|
Bodson, Fernand (Lucien Emile Marie)
(b Liège, 6 June 1877; d Madison, OH, 4 March 1966). Belgian architect, urban planner and critic. He began his studies in architecture in 1893 at the Ecole St-Luc in Liège but quickly abandoned them in favour of training with an architectural firm. From 1901 to 1906 he trained with Eduard Cuypers in Amsterdam, where he met P. L. Kramer and was influenced by H. P. Berlage, whose urban planning manifesto Kunst en maatschappij (1910) he later published in French. A socialist in politics and a Rationalist in architecture, Bodson was in partnership with Antoine Pompe from 1910 to 1920, and notable projects include the Ferme–Ecole pour Enfants Anormaux (1913), Waterloo; the Maison du Peuple (1914; with Pompe; unexecuted), Liège; and the Batavia complex (1919; with Pompe and Raphaël Verwilghen), Roeselare. With Pompe he also experimented with the industrially based prefabrication of low-cost housing. In 1928 he completed eight residential blocks for old people at Homborch, Brussels, and at the end of the 1930s he retired from architectural practice. His interest in urban planning is reflected in the technical journals he founded and edited with Verwilghen: Tekhné (1912–13) and Art et Technique (1913–14; renamed La Cité, 1919). He was a founder-member of the Société des Urbanistes Belges in 1919. A forceful and acerbic critic of conventional turn-of-the-century architectural attitudes, Bodson was one of the first generation of Belgian modernists, for whom the solutions of the later Functionalists were to seem too extreme.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
