Joseph Vanderstraeten

Joseph Vanderstraeten was an architect active in Brussels mainly between the wars and still in the early 1950s; the sources consulted give neither his dates of birth and death nor his training. The Brussels heritage inventory attributes to him, in 1923, a town house at 3 avenue Géo Bernier in Ixelles and a rental house at 21 avenue Huart Hamoir in Schaerbeek. In 1929 he designed two neighbouring apartment buildings: 4 boulevard de la Cambre, of seven storeys under a mock mansard, and, on the corner at 1 avenue du Congo in Ixelles, an eight-storey building on a triangular plot, built at the request of Cocquyt and of the architect himself. His largest group is the consistent row of Art Deco buildings on avenue Massenet in Forest, from no. 2a to no. 32, which he built almost entirely between 1931 and 1938 (except nos. 18 to 24-26) on through plots that also front chaussée de Bruxelles; according to the inventory, these buildings were designed "by and for" himself and the architect Ferdinand Meert, on land he had bought. The corpus includes seven of them: the houses at nos. 6 and 8 (1931) and 12 (1933), and the apartment buildings at nos. 10 (1933), 2a and 4 (1935) and 14 (1938); in 1936 he also designed an apartment building at 152 avenue du Parc in Forest.

Translated from the French original.