Vincent Cols

Vincent Cols, born in Antwerp on 23 February 1890 and died in Kapellen in 1968, was an Antwerp engineer-architect whose archives are held by the Flanders Architecture Institute. He graduated as an engineer from the University of Leuven in 1911 and in 1912 went into partnership with Jules De Roeck; the architect August Cols was his uncle. The Cols-De Roeck office, active until 1965, first made its name in the 1920s with garden suburbs and houses for well-to-do clients, mostly in a traditionalist style, before shifting around 1930 towards company, office and apartment buildings in a more contemporary idiom. In 1922 the pair designed Vincent Cols's own villa at Della Faillelaan 24, one of at least seven country houses they built in the Den Brandt park suburb; other works include the apartment building at Leopoldstraat 21 (1922-1923), the Le Drapeau biscuit factory (1923), the warehouse of Verreries J.B. Gaasch (1923-1924), the raising of the Ruys garage and the villa at Oosterveldlaan 8 (1926). In 1929, with Jan Vanhoenacker and John Van Beurden, they designed the fourteen-storey Art Deco tower of the former Century Hotel on De Keyserlei. In the 1930s their Art Deco became sober and functional, as in the Peeters-Mennen building (1932), the Guiette house (1932), the house of Merksem mayor Jozef Nolf (1932, with Jules De Munter), the Cols-Spruyt building (1935), commissioned by the family of notary Antoine Cols-Spruyt, the architect's nephew, and the apartment building at Lange Herentalsestraat 53 (1936).

Translated from the French original.