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Helleputte, Joris [Georges]
(b Ghent, 31 Aug 1852; d Leuven, 22 Feb 1925). Belgian architect and politician. In 1873 he obtained his diploma in civil engineering at the Ecole Spéciale de Génie Civil of the State University of Ghent. In 1874 he was appointed assistant professor and from 1878 to 1907 was full professor at the Catholic University of Leuven (Ecoles Spéciales de Génie Civil, des Arts et des Manufactures et des Mines), where he developed a training programme in architectural engineering. While a student he met Louis Cloquet and was influenced by the Belgian Gothic Revival movement, which was founded by Jean-Baptiste Bethune, also the founder (in 1862) of the St Luke School, Ghent. Helleputte’s architecture is similar to that of the first generation of St Luke architects in its almost undecorated and rather stern style. Its formal characteristics, modelled on the local Late Gothic style and traditional brick and limestone architecture, are strictly determined by constructional and functional needs. His most important works were built in Leuven for the Catholic University: the Anatomy Theatre (1877), the Philosophy Institute and Leo XIII Seminar (1893–4), and the Justus Lipsius College (1878–9). For this last building he brought together individual craftsmen who were then trained and organized along the lines of medieval guilds. Helleputte saw this as an experiment for the corporate reorganization of contemporary society. In his later work he abandoned strict Gothic Revival formulae by introducing new constructional techniques, such as the steel rib vaults of St Francis of Sales in Liège (1890–94, destr. 1988). In the early 1890s Helleputte progressively devolved his activities as architect to his younger colleagues, having been elected a member of the Belgian Parliament for the Catholic Right in 1889; this launched a successful political career that he used to further his artistic and social ideals.
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