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Van der Swaelmen, Louis
(b Brussels, 18 Oct 1883; d Montreux, 12 Oct 1929). Belgian urban planner, landscape designer and painter. He was trained as a landscape designer by his father, Louis-Léopold Van der Swaelmen, and took an active part in the foundation of the Union Internationale des Villes during the Exposition Universelle et Internationale at Ghent (1913). There he met Patrick Geddes who had a deep influence on his ideas about urban planning. During World War I Van der Swaelmen was exiled in the Netherlands where he became close to H. P. Berlage; during this time he prepared for the reconstruction of his country by centralizing research and documentation in the Comité Néerlando-belge d’Art Civique, which he founded in 1916. In that year he also published his ideas as Préliminaires d’art civique, which was one of the first explicit theories on functionalist urban planning to be published in Belgium. Having returned there after the war, he organized modernist urban planners into the Société Belge des Urbanistes et Architectes Modernistes, which produced the magazine La Cité. With the Société he arranged the Exposition de la Reconstruction (1919) at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels and promoted the construction of low-cost housing and garden cities. He played a major role in planning the first garden cities in Belgium, including Selzaete, near Ghent (1921–3), le Kapelleveld (1923–6) in collaboration with Antoine Pompe, Le Logis and Floréal (1921–30) in collaboration with Jean-Jules Eggericx, the last three in the region of Brussels. He was also an important proponent of modernism in the 1920s. From 1927 he was Professor of Urban Planning at the Institut Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels. Van der Swaelmen was also a self-taught painter and associated with the group Les XX. In 1927 he built a tomb-memorial of the poet Emile Verhaeren in St Amands.
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