Tangissart Parish Hall

• Date 1953 (démolie)
• Address 1490 Tangissart (Court-Saint-Etienne)

A year after completing the Pont-de-Bonne Chapel, Charles Vandenhove and Lucien Kroll were commissioned to design a parish hall in Tangissart, a small hamlet in the municipality of Court-Saint-Etienne. Although the architects had some experience in religious architecture, they adopted a completely different approach here. Vandenhove and Kroll experimented with the ‘ceramic fusées’ construction system. Developed and patented in 1945 by the French architect Jacques Couëlle, and based on the interlocking of ceramic elements shaped like bottles without bottoms, the system was one of the solutions devised by architects in the immediate post-war period to minimise and rationalise construction costs. The method enjoyed considerable success in the 1950s, and it is reasonable to assume that it was primarily economic considerations that led the Vandenhove–Kroll duo and the client to favour this construction technique. With a blank plot of land at their disposal, they designed a hall whose simple, basic form is reminiscent, on a modest scale, of Freyssinet’s large vaulted hangars. The two architects went on to use the system again in the construction of two semi-detached houses in Waterloo in 1954.

• Description of the collection

  1 folder containing a few photographs.

• AUTHOR AND DATE OF THE ENTRY Sébastien Charlier, 2021