Complexe Helvetica — Anvers

Pair of Art Deco apartment buildings built for the public limited company Helvetica, set up by the widow Julia Halévy-Löwy for this property investment, to designs of 1935-1936 by the architect David Moëd; erected one after the other in 1936-1937, beginning with the corner building, they share an inner garden. The inventory counts this complex among the fifteen or so apartment buildings erected in the 1930s around the Stadspark; its height, exceeding the regulations, was exceptionally allowed. The corner building on the Rubenslei and the Maria-Henriëttalei, with a concrete frame, has nine symmetrical bays, a basement, a raised principal floor and seven cantilevered upper storeys under a flat roof, in red brick, white stone and bluestone; the rounded, taller corner is marked by a rising triple window, originally of leaded glass, beneath an undulating banderole-shaped top piece, and the side bay windows have an attic crowning with typical Art Deco vases. The Art Deco ironwork of the ground-floor breastworks and cellar grilles and the entrance door by the J. Gowie workshop of Berchem survive, as does the hall of white marble, travertine and panelling with its original lift; the windows have largely been renewed. The more modest building on the Maria-Henriëttalei, of four bays and nine storeys, in white stone slabs now painted over and red brick, keeps its entrance with Art Deco metal joinery by the same workshop and its two 1936-1937 Jaspar lifts with wooden cages. The buildings are recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.