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Vandenhove, Charles
(b Teuven, Liège, 3 July 1927). Belgian architect, urban planner, furniture designer and teacher. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, in 1952 and went into partnership with his fellow student Lucien Kroll until 1957. In his early career he adhered to the rationalist aesthetic of the Modern Movement: simplicity of volumes, strong geometricization and legibility of structure were the hallmarks of this early conviction. From 1958 to 1986, the Université de Liège was his main client. The first project he undertook for this institution, a mortuary clinic, belongs to his ‘Cubist’ period, characterized by the massive expanses of brick wall to which the style of his own house (1961; enlarged in 1972) in Liège and other university buildings are related. The Institut d’Education Physicale (1963), Liège, is in some ways a related work: without departing from Vandenhove’s characteristic approach, it has a very powerful unifying form, generated by the arrangement of the interior plans. It also, however, heralded Vandenhove’s second ‘period’, which was characterized by geometric structure, simplified as much as possible, and by archetypal forms: large sloping roofs, enclosing walls and colonnades. This evolution was evident in the Standard sports hall (1965), Liège, and became more marked in the seven private houses he built between 1967 and 1978. The return to classical principles of composition that characterize this decade was accompanied by a progressive incorporation of architectonic elements, inspired by tradition, such as capitals, entablatures, friezes and cornices. The reception centre La Maison Blanche (1981), Esneux, near Liège, and the Delforge house (1983), Namur, represent the culmination of this approach.
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