R.V.S. Building — Anvers

Art Deco apartment building designed in 1938 by the architect Jos. Baeyens for the Belgian branch of the Rotterdamsche Verzekering Sociëteiten (R.V.S.), a life-insurance company of Dutch origin, on the corner of the Italiëlei and the present Franklin Rooseveltplaats; the company had first had a very similar building designed in 1937 by Joseph Somers, abandoned for unknown reasons. The inventory considers it representative of the "zakelijk" (functional) Art Deco of Baeyens's mature work. With a reinforced-concrete frame and a splayed corner, the nine-bay building has eight storeys under a flat roof, with a facing entirely of natural stone on a bluestone plinth; the cantilevered upper storeys end in an attic, and the markedly horizontal composition, with its registers of wide windows, is dominated by the taller three-sided corner section, girdled by a continuous stepped profiled moulding that then edges the ribbed attic. The crowning of the corner carries a carved relief of the R.V.S. logo (the elderly couple with a little dog and a parasol drawn in 1905 by Tjeerd Bottema), now hidden behind an illuminated sign. Of the ground floor only the private entrance with its metal door survives, the rest having been altered from the 1980s, when the roof storey under a copper dome above the corner was added; the entrance hall in red flamed marble survives. The building is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.