Joseph Van Neck

Joseph Van Neck, born in Anderlecht on 12 March 1880 and died in Uccle on 25 February 1959, attended Ernest Acker's classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1897 to 1902 and won the Godecharle Prize in 1903. At the 1910 Brussels World's Fair he built the pavilion of the City of Brussels. As chief architect of the 1935 World's Fair, he designed the Grand Palais at Heysel with the engineer Louis Baes, roofed by twelve reinforced-concrete arches, and he added a new hall on the plateau in 1949. He also designed Art Deco social housing on rue du Fort in Saint-Gilles (1922) and an office building on rue des Pierres in Brussels (1929). He was director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1938 to 1941 and again from 1944 to 1948. A member of the Société centrale d'architecture de Belgique from 1907, he was its president in 1928 and 1929; he was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

Translated from the French original.