In consultation with the city council, TMH had already purchased the majority of the land at an acceptable price in 1962. It concerned a 29-hectare piece of farmland on the southern edge of the city, with the city park to the north, the Aa river to the east and south, and the Steenweg op Tielen to the west. As usual, the state would be responsible for the total costs of road works, sewerage, water supply network, footpaths and green zones. The city also took on the costs for the gas pressure network, low-voltage network, and public lighting. There was an agreement that TMH would transfer the green space to the city and that the city council would continue to maintain it. The NMH granted loans for the construction of the houses. In 1962, TMH asked architects Wauters and Vanhout to assess the condition of the grounds. The two architects had built hundreds of houses for TMH since the late 1950s. They immediately involved landscape and garden architect, Rik Carlier, who prepared a report. He advised preserving the orchards behind the farms, as well as two rows of willows and 21 native oaks. To create sightlines through to the towers of the main church and the Church of Our Lady Mediatrix, he suggested cutting down some trees in the city park.
As in private housing construction, 1963 and 1964 were particularly creative years in social housing, during which architects, moving from utopia to reality, continuously devised new solutions. The initial design sketches show a certain evolution: from an almost complete development of the surface with long rows of houses along straight or curved streets, with appartment blocks at their ends, to clusters within an increasingly larger green zone. Eventually, the public green space found its place as a long strip in the middle of the site. Meanwhile, the architectural team was strengthened with Paul Neefs.. He drew the ‘preliminary design 1’ at a scale of 1/2500. All buildings follow an axis system that is oriented due north-south. In the north stand three apartment towers with 15 floors. Also located at the centre of the district are the church, the parish centre and the shops. In the south we find four apartment blocks each six floors high with apartments. The rows of houses are bundled in two clusters. The 14 villas and 16 elderly housing units are oraganised somewhat more freely. Of the 800 housing units, 28% have a garage. These are not located near the houses, but are grouped in rows of 4 to 14 units. Most rows of houses were therefore not served by a street, but by a footpath. It is striking how much this preliminary design is indebted to the Lafayette district in Detroit, based on a 1955 design by architect Mies van der Rohe and urbanist Ludwig Hilberseimer, which Wauters and Neefs had visited with Lou Jansen a few months earlier. There too, all buildings follow the same axis system, there is a great variety in building typology, and greenery is omnipresent. In Lafayette Park, there is an even greater separation between mechanical and pedestrian traffic than in this first preliminary design: all cars are parked in parking lots and all homes are only accessible on foot.
In 1964, Wauters was appointed chief architect for the urban planning study of the Parkwijk, assisted by Vanhout and Neefs.. This was also reflected in the fee, which was double for Wauters compared to the others. In spring, the urbanisation plan was systematically modified. This was when the architects of the Parkwijk also drew plans for the districts of Gierle and Tielen. There must have been cross-pollination. In June 1964, a model of the Parkwijk was presented to the royal couple. From around the same time, there exists a coloured plan at 1/50 scale, with a slightly different position of the church. The direction of all buildings is rotated 25° counterclockwise compared to the preliminary design, so everything fits better into the shape of the terrain. The new plan was expanded with a petrol station, a clubhouse for the elderly, kindergarten classrooms and dormitories: blocks with single-room apartments for singles. There was also a rigorous separation between pedestrians and cars: every other home, the church, kindergarten classrooms, and shops can be reached without crossing a single street. 73% of the terraced houses have a garage, located in the private garden. At the end of 1964, the architects proposed to TMH that each terraced house be provided with a garage-storage space. The private garden is separated from the street by a garden wall. With this, the architects achieve the same screening and mass effect as in the then recently completed Dansk Samvirkehuse by JørnUtzon at Fredensborg.. This district was visited during a study trip to Denmark that the TMH board of directors undertook together with the architects. Patio homes border three cul-de-sacs. The largest part of the terrain is kept free for grassland. Residents have contact with nature through a lowered section in the patio wall. Wauters’ plans for the terraced houses date from late 1964. Here, the patio house was introduced as a new type. It has a small patio between the garage and kitchen and a large one adjacent to the sitting area and bedrooms. Paul Schellekens, who had graduated and was doing an internship with Vanhout, made a perspective drawing of a block with twelve patio homes. In this, we can clearly see the brutalist style of the architectural firm, with the concrete roof edges, the spouts and the water basins.
It took until mid-1966 for the final urban planning design and the house plans to be completed. They were drawn by Paul Neefs.. The design language is extremely austere through the dominance of dark brick. Because all windows run from floor to ceiling and vary from wide to very narrow, a careful and minimalist composition is achieved.
In the urban planning design, the dormitories have disappeared and the housing clusters have gained a clearer position: one in the north, one in the east, and one in the west. Traffic-wise, a simplification was implemented: there is one main road that follows the edge of the site and leads to the Steenweg op Tielen. As a result, the centre has shifted westward and spread out to the shops, which connect to the parking area, and the church, the parish center and the facility for the elderly, which are situated around a smaller square. The apartment blocks, with 176 housing units, remain located in the south and the towers, with 204 apartments, now span the entire zone in the northeast that connects to the city park. The houses are grouped in rows of four to ten. There are forty-seven blocks with row houses and four blocks with patio houses. Together with the twenty-eight ‘elderly housing units’ and the nine houses above the shops, the total amounts to 823 housing units. In the first phase, 82 houses were built in the west of the domain. Only eight types of houses occur, depending on the number of bedrooms and the orientation. With type B the garden is located in the east or west, with D in the south and with F in the north. Types G and H are the patio houses. They all have three bedrooms. Types A, C and E are located at the ends of the rows and have four bedrooms. A peculiarity is that on the plans the garden walls are not positioned next to the garage doors, as they were ultimately built, but on the other side of the garages, creating courtyards with a width of 3.50 m.
The landscaping of the Parkwijk was designed by garden and landscape architects Carlier and Claeys from Dessel. In 1972, they won first prize with it in the national competition ‘Green Spaces’, organised by the National Housing Institute. In the same year, Carli Vanhout submitted the building permit application for the tenth and final phase of the houses. In this phase, some windows do not run from floor to ceiling and are made of aluminum instead of steel. Apart from these imperfections, the entire district has a homogeneous appearance. This was guaranteed by the relatively short total construction time and the limited number of architects. Vanhout received additional commissions for 134 houses in the Parkwijk, Wauters for 124 houses and 27 elderly homes. As the only outsider, architect August Wauters integrated his 66 houses inconspicuously among the others. In 1970, the city council built two kindergarten classrooms in prefabricated concrete. Later they were expanded with a primary school. The Blijde Boodschap Church was built in 1971-1972 according to a design by René Van Steenbergen. The Vanhout & Schellekens office was responsible for the designs of the social centre (1973) and the festival hall (1978). There are designs by Eugène Wauters for four apartment buildings according to the original scheme in the south of the site. The scheme was abandoned circa 1970 abandoned to make way for one building in zigzag form. This apartment block in the south ultimately did not materialize. The originally planned three northern residential towers were replaced by two buildings of six and seven floors high, with zigzag-shaped plans, drawn in 1974 by Adriaan Van Eemeren. By the end of the 1970s, 207 apartments and 442 houses had been built, of which approximately half had been sold.
This grand project, typical of the prosperity of the 1960s, was thus largely executed according to the original plans. It was conceived as a self-contained community – a village – with all necessary facilities. The nine shops are still successful today. Some planned services proved unfeasible: the district police, a nursery, a branch library and a petrol station. The Parkwijk is a pleasant environment to live in. Residents particularly appreciate the green spaces. However, some of the qualities found in the original model were diluted during realisation. The uniformity of the housing settlement provides too few recognition points. The originally planned, but not fully executed, medium and high-rise blocks would have given the district more structure. The original narrow towers in the north would have closed off the Parkwijk less from the city park than the broad front of the built appartments. The functional separation of zones and the dominant grid are modernist objectives that were not applied as strictly in later districts. Children play just as well in the streets and parking lots as in the playgrounds. Nevertheless, the concept of the Parkwijk holds up. It remains a showpiece of public housing.
Source: ‘Architecture from the Golden Sixties: The Turnhout School’
