Immeuble à appartements L'Imperator — Anvers

Apartment building on the corner of the Teniersplaats and the Kipdorpvest, built to a 1936 design by the architect Joseph Selis; its ground floor housed the café-bodega "L'Imperator", now gone, with ten flats on the upper floors. According to the journal Bâtir of July 1936, it was completed in less than six months, demolition and shell construction taking only six weeks thanks to the concrete frame, by the contractor Algemeene Ondernemingen J. Spiessens-Van Nereaux of Deurne; the exceeding of the permitted height by more than 6 m, to 23.30 m, was allowed for the embellishment of the city. The inventory describes an architecture halfway between functional modernism and streamlined Art Deco. The six storeys under a flat roof, topped by a rounded pavilion, have a 32 m façade faced in white Brauvilliers stone on the upper floors and beige and black marble on the ground floor; the upper floors form wide full-height bay windows, interrupted by the double bay of the staircase, and the rounded, taller corner is crowned by an undulating top piece in the shape of an open book, while rounded corners and cornices, continuous window registers and undulating friezes accentuate the streamlined character. Of the ground floor there remain the quarter-round café canopy and the private entrance with two doors in Art Deco ironwork; the steel window frames have been renewed, and the marble staircase keeps its 1936 Thièry lift, behind an Art Deco wrought-iron grille more than two metres high. The building is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.