« Voile sur la Plate-Taille » Hydraulic Infrastructures and Recreational Landscapes in Belgian Modernism

Pirard, Marie [UCL]

(eng) The article explores the construction of hydraulic dams and reservoirs on the Eau d'Heure river, between 1971 and 1980, in a rural site upstream from the industrial Sambre-et-Meuse valley. The case study aims at questioning the making of the postwar Belgian landscape, by bringing together two predominant and at first glance antagonistic entities: infrastructural networks and leisure facilities, respectively embodying the material and cultural backbone of the Welfare State. The angle of attack is thus that of hybridity and contamination between disjointed spheres, whose interactions will be traced and articulated to the site design. The dams project is at the crossroads of multiple narratives and scales. As part of the national postwar infrastructure modernization plans, it responds to macro-economic ambitions and is indirectly embedded in the first stages of the European integration project. Concurrently, it represents a place of controversies and negotiations fueled by the claims of the inhabitants of the valleys threatened by flooding and marked by the progressive enlistment of local authorities, crystallized around the idea of reshaping the site for mass leisure. The dams - simultaneously bearing the attributes of a recreational healthy nature and those of the radical artificialization of the country’s resources in freshwater - turn out to be a condensed sample of what Bruno Latour calls ‘the proliferation of hybrids’, populated by entities that are, at once, natural, social and narrated (Latour, 1991, p7-17). From the 1930s anticipatory action of the modernist architect Victor Bourgeois in favor of hygiene-oriented leisure practices to the successive interventions of the Ministry of Public Works, the engineer-architect Jean Barthelemy and the urban-planner Raymond Lemaire, the article will question the role played by architecture and urban design in this hybrid narrative: do these spatial interventions constitute practices of mediation and/or of purification (Latour, 1991, 46-50)?