(b Charleroi, 29 Aug 1897; d Brussels, 24 July 1962). Belgian architect, theorist and urban planner. He grew up in the Pays Noir, the most heavily industrialized region of Belgium, an experience that led to his early and intense interest in social issues. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels (1914–18) and began practising architecture immediately. In 1919–20 he was part of the technical department of the Société Nationale des Habitations à Bon Marché, which was created to find rapid solutions to the problem of workers’ housing. Upon his return from several trips to the Netherlands, he built his first major work, a small housing group (1922) in the Rue du Cubisme in the Koekelberg district of Brussels. It had an expressively modelled elevation and composition of separate volumes somewhat suggestive of similar developments of the time in the Netherlands, but its sober use of materials in their natural state also clearly showed its origins in the work of H. P. Berlage, for whom Bourgeois had great admiration.