Old England (department store)
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The Old England (french: Vieille Angleterre, nl, Oud Engeland) department store was a large retailer in central
Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
, Belgium, partially housed in a notable Art Nouveau building constructed in 1899 by Paul Saintenoy out of girded steel and glass. Today, its former buildings house the Musical Instruments Museum (MIM), founded in 1877, which forms part of the group of Royal Museums for Art and History (RMAH). Located at 2, / on the Mont des Arts/Kunstberg, the building stands next to the Place Royale/Koningsplein and in front of the
Magritte Museum The Magritte Museum (french: Musée Magritte, nl, Magritte Museum) is an art museum in central Brussels, Belgium, dedicated to the work of the Belgian surrealist artist, René Magritte. It is one of the constituent museums of the Royal Museu ...
. It is served by Brussels Central Station and Parc/Park metro station on lines 1 and 5 of the
Brussels Metro The Brussels Metro (french: Métro de Bruxelles, nl, Brusselse metro) is a rapid transit system serving a large part of the Brussels-Capital Region of Belgium. It consists of four conventional metro lines and three ''premetro'' lines. The me ...
.


History

From 1886 onwards, the company's primary location was actually in the main building of the former Hôtel de Spangen, a complex of residences built mostly by Corneille Juste Philibert Philippe, Count of Spangen, between 1775 and 1782 on the Place Royale/Koningsplein in central Brussels. The property was eventually sold and partitioned to several different enterprises, including a hotel, and eventually the Old England company, which successively acquired more of the complex in stages in 1905, 1909, and 1911. In 1913, Old England completed renovations that demolished the 18th-century interiors in order to better accommodate its retail functions.


Paul Saintenoy

The building was designed by the architect Paul Saintenoy, was strongly influenced by the architecture of
Victor Horta Victor Pierre Horta (; Victor, Baron Horta after 1932; 6 January 1861 – 8 September 1947) was a Belgian architect and designer, and one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement. His Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, built in 1892–93, is often ...
,
Paul Hankar Paul Hankar (11 December 1859 – 17 January 1901) was a Belgian architect and furniture designer, and an innovator in the Art Nouveau style. Career Hankar was born at Frameries, in Hainaut, Belgium, the son of a stonemason. He studied at th ...
, and the rationalist architectural theories of
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (; 27 January 181417 September 1879) was a French architect and author who restored many prominent medieval landmarks in France, including those which had been damaged or abandoned during the French Revolution. H ...
, also famous for his work restoring Gothic buildings. Horta and Hankar's buildings laid the groundwork for the widespread development of the style called Art Nouveau in Belgium and France. Horta's buildings in particular made free and conspicuous use of industrialised methods of construction, with steel frames and large-scale glass panels as infill, allowing for interiors to be bathed in light and in large measure dissolving the boundary between interior and exterior. This became a preferred technique for the construction of retail shop windows and department stores, to encourage the practice of window-shopping. Though Saintenoy was not nearly as famous as Horta, Hankar,
Henry van de Velde Henry Clemens van de Velde (; 3 April 1863 – 15 October 1957) was a Belgian painter, architect, interior designer, and art theorist. Together with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, he is considered one of the founders of Art Nouveau in Belgium ...
or
Gustave Serrurier-Bovy Gustave Serrurier-Bovy (1858–1910) was a Belgian architect and furniture designer. He is credited (along with Paul Hankar, Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde) with creating the Art Nouveau style, coined as a style in Paris by art dealer S ...
, the four most noteworthy practitioners of Art Nouveau in and from Belgium, he was well known at the turn of the century for his numerous buildings that use the style, most notably several smaller townhouses around Brussels, most of which still survive today and form part of the city's important heritage centred around the style.


Art Nouveau branch of Old England

The Old England department store opened a new branch location not far from its original building on the Place Royale in 1899, designed by Saintenoy in concert with the engineer E. Wyhovski. Using a steel superstructure, he negotiated the rather narrow lot that sloped significantly and curved along the line of the street, designing six-story building that used a main facade balanced around a projecting central oriel bay itself crowned by a high arched attic. The building's expansive curtain walls of glass over the entire facade maximise the influx of natural light, which is accented by the octagonal oriel tower at the northwest corner of the building that begins on the fourth floor and terminates in a lacy steel pergola that uses the structural frame of a
cupola In architecture, a cupola () is a relatively small, most often dome-like, tall structure on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome. The word derives, via Italian, fro ...
's spire. Its ornament, painted a dark green like the rest of the structure, curves around the frame to create supporting brackets that mimic the forms of vines and
tendril In botany, a tendril is a specialized stem, leaf or petiole with a threadlike shape used by climbing plants for support and attachment, as well as cellular invasion by parasitic plants such as '' Cuscuta''. There are many plants that have tend ...
s of plants, hallmarks of the "industrial" type of Art Nouveau design. The structure thus constitutes an essay in the structural properties of iron and steel that maximises its utility as a department store. The vibrant green colour, accented by the yellow and orange enamelled signage proclaiming the store's name, set it off from the light masonry and stucco structures around it, functioning thus as a landmark in the streetscape. The large expanses of glass for the exterior envelope allowed potential customers to easily and casually peruse the items from the street, ultimately drawing them inside to shop more aggressively, and providing a modicum of transparency in the process of selling by declaring implicitly that the company had nothing to hide from consumers. None of these architectural strategies were new for the department store or retail shop as a building type, but Saintenoy's Old England store is one of the earliest examples of the bare iron/steel-and-glass curtain-wall facade being employed on such a large scale (most earlier department stores had clad their metal frame in some kind of masonry, at least on the facade). Horta would employ the same strategy on his famous ''À L'Innovation'' store in Brussels, completed in 1901, as would Henry Gutton on his ''Grand Bazar de la rue de Rennes'' in Paris, a branch of the ''Magasins Réunis'' department store chain, finished in 1907.


Subsequent history and transformation

The building was bought by the
Belgian Government The Federal Government of Belgium ( nl, Federale regering, french: Gouvernement fédéral, german: Föderalregierung) exercises executive power in the Kingdom of Belgium. It consists of ministers and secretary of state ("junior", or deputy-mini ...
in 1978 after Old England moved out in 1972. It took over fifteen years to complete restoration and renovation work on the structure, which really began in 1989, and was in fairly bad shape. The same year, it was listed as a protected monument by the Monuments and Sites Directorate of the Brussels-Capital Region. The Musical Instruments Museum (MIM) moved into the structure between 1989 and 1994. Its exhibits include significant sections on Brussels' role in the history of manufacturing musical instruments, including the birthplace of the
saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of Single-reed instrument, single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed (mouthpi ...
as the home of
Adolphe Sax Antoine-Joseph "Adolphe" Sax (; 6 November 1814 – 4 February 1894) was a Belgian inventor and musician who invented the saxophone in the early 1840s, patenting it in 1846. He also invented the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba. He played the f ...
.


See also

*
Art Nouveau in Brussels The Art Nouveau movement of architecture and design first appeared in Brussels, Belgium, in the early 1890s, and quickly spread to France and to the rest of Europe. It began as a reaction against the formal vocabulary of European academic art, ...
*
History of Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
* Belgium in "the long nineteenth century"


References


Notes

{{coord, 50.84290, 4.35895, format=dms, type:landmark_region:BE, display=title Buildings and structures in Brussels City of Brussels Protected heritage sites in Brussels Art Nouveau architecture in Brussels Art Nouveau retail buildings Commercial buildings completed in 1899