École des Sœurs de l'Enfance de Jésus — Schoten

School of the Sisters of the Holy Childhood (Kindsheid Jesu), comprising a school, a chapel and a convent, designed in 1930 by the master builder Gustave Voets and built from that year by the contractors Gebroeders Verstraete of Wilrijk; it replaced the congregation's boarding school for young boys on Antwerp's left bank, expropriated in 1923, and took in 145 children in 1932. The buildings, of brown brick with sparing use of white stone, are designed, according to the inventory, in an Art Deco style that is 'sober, but sustained throughout'. The symmetrical main wing, of three storeys and twenty-one bays under a flat roof, is centred on a taller entrance projection with a niche holding a statue of the young Jesus and a stone cross rising above the roof. The chapel wing at right angles houses a festival hall on the ground floor, lit by wide pointed-arch windows, with the chapel on the upper floor. The interior retains a sober, polychrome Art Deco fit-out: red floor tiles, yellow ceramic tile dados with decorated tiles showing animal motifs and black geometric bands, painted Art Deco motifs in the stair hall and terrazzo stairs with iron railings. The school, a free primary school in 2014, is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.