Immeuble à appartements Van Broekhoven — Anvers

Corner apartment building in the Art Deco style, built for A. Van Broekhoven after a 1936 design by the architect Frank Blockx (façade inscription); it contains two shops and eight modest flats and replaced a traditional sixteenth-century house, the "Gulden Bot". The inventory presents it as a representative example of the matter-of-fact Art Deco ("zakelijke art deco") that Blockx was then developing in his apartment buildings, while his individual houses remained in historicist styles. With a canted corner, seven unequal bays and four storeys under a slate pseudo-mansard, it combines yellow-orange brick facing, white stone for the bay windows and surrounds, and a ground floor entirely in bluestone. Its plastic, dynamic massing — a projecting rounded corner between rectangular bay windows rising over three storeys and crowned by wrought-iron balustrades — and its polychromy of materials show, according to the inventory, affinities with the New Hague School; the joinery has been renewed. It is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.