|
Janlet, (Charles-)Emile
(b Brussels, 1 Jan 1839; d Brussels, 14 Sept 1918). Belgian architect. He was the son of the architect Félix Janlet (1808–68) and received his professional training at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and in the studios of his father and of Henri Beyaert. Collaborating occasionally with his brother, Gustave Janlet, he rapidly gained prominence as one of the leading architects of Brussels and a conspicuous proponent of the Flemish Renaissance Revival that was coming into fashion in the early 1870s. Indeed Janlet’s Ecole Communale no. 13 (1876–9), Place Anneessens, Brussels, marked the maturity of that style in Belgium. Similar to the exterior of this school was Janlet’s contemporary and widely acclaimed Belgian façade (destr.) in the Rue des Nations at the Paris Exposition Universelle (1878). Both buildings had scroll gables and exhibited a distinctive red, white and black structural polychromy of native Belgian materials, so that sympathetic critics could justifiably regard them as prototypes, both formally and materially, of a ‘national’ style of Belgian building. Janlet designed a number of other Flemish Renaissance Revival buildings and then moved towards the creation of a more sober, rational architecture with his designs for the Mechelen railway station (1888; destr.; see P. Pastiels: ‘Les Gares d’antan’ [Brussels], Direction commerciale de la Société nationale des chemins de fer belges, 1978, p. 66) and the Musée des Sciences Naturelles (1898–1903; now Institut des Sciences Naturelles) in the Parc Léopold, Brussels. These buildings, which featured little historicist ornamentation, used large areas of glass between skeletal structural elements of iron and masonry respectively. Janlet was a member of the Commission Royale des Monuments et des Sites, and he exercised considerable influence over the replanning and rebuilding, in revived vernacular historical styles, of many Belgian cities devastated during World War I, notably Leuven.
|
|
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
|
