Brugmann Hospital (Horta site)

Georges Brugmann, a businessman and philanthropist who died in 1900, had left a bequest to the General Council of Hospices and Relief of Brussels; in agreement with his brother Alfred, his executor, five million francs of it were set aside for a hospital that was to bear his name. In 1906 the Council announced its wish to build a modern hospital open to everyone, which would also house the medical faculty of the Free University of Brussels.

The Council’s president, Maurice Frison, and one of its members, the lawyer Max Hallet, put forward their friend Victor Horta. In July 1906 the Council entrusted him with the plans and the direction of the works. From September to November he toured the most modern hospitals of France, Germany, England, Austria and the Netherlands. On 21 December 1906 he set out some thirty site layouts, and the Council chose the pavilion hospital.

The architect’s contract was signed on 23 March 1907. His first preliminary scheme, presented in July, came with an estimate that was at once judged unaffordable. The second was approved in July 1909; still too expensive, it was cut down to 700 beds and lost some services. The third version, accepted by the City on 31 January 1910, kept the general layout but set aside only half of the land for building, several pavilions having been dropped from the plan.

Alfred Brugmann laid the foundation stone on 10 August 1911. In January 1914 Horta drew the garden plan with the landscape architect Jules Janlet. During his exile in the United States, from 1915 to 1919, his closest assistant, André Dautzenberg, ran the works with the engineer Georges Vellut; Horta took over the supervision again on his return. The hospital was inaugurated on 18 June 1923 in the presence of the king and queen, whom Horta guided round the institution, and it opened its doors to patients on 25 June.

From the day it opened the hospital had to grow denser: terraces were closed in to gain rooms, storeys were added and annexes filled the gaps between pavilions. Horta considerably enlarged the nurses’ home in 1930. In 1992 the Brussels public social welfare centre (CPAS) launched a project to rework the site; the 1994 competition chose Philippe Samyn & Partners with BEAI, whose idea was to keep most of the pavilions, strip them of later additions and base the new buildings on the lines of Horta’s plan. Five new inpatient wings were inaugurated, the first two in 2003 and the rest in 2009, followed by a polyclinic in 2017.

The mortuary and chapel building was listed in 2005 and restored in 2006–2007 by Samyn & Partners and BEAI together with the architect Barbara Van der Wee; converted into a conference and training centre, it was inaugurated in 2009. Since 19 August 2024 the administration and pharmacy, the medicine and surgery pavilions for adults and children, the tumour centre, dermatology, the nurses’ home, the central kitchen, the technical services, the director’s house and the boundary wall have been entered on the legal heritage inventory.

The hospital follows the pavilion model, which keeps buildings apart to limit contagion. The services are self-contained and on one level, separate men from women and are equipped for particular conditions; covered pedestrian walkways link them, either open with arcades or closed with glazing and heated in winter, and bring them light and ventilation. In the plan as built, 37 detached pavilions were set in a park, along 3.25 kilometres of paths and lanes lined with trees, shrubberies, flowerbeds and lawns. The sloping site is organised along a central south-east/north-west axis, chosen to get the most light and to reduce exposure to the prevailing winds and rain. Horta wanted the first impression to be of a park in which greenery outweighs architecture.

The main entrance is on the south side, on Place Arthur Van Gehuchten. A triple porch with glazed canopies, demolished soon after 1968, led to the consultation courtyard, originally covered by a glass roof; it is flanked on the left by the administration building, which also housed emergency reception, and on the right by the pharmacy. On the axis, the adult-medicine consultation pavilion comes before five ward pavilions joined by a long glazed gallery; extensions grafted onto it since the 1930s have left it with natural light in only a short section.

On the facades, Dieren brick in three tones (orange-red, red and white) is set off with bluestone, some of it cut to profiles characteristic of Horta’s work. Orange-red dominates the massive buildings on the edge (entrance, nurses’ home, mortuary); white is kept for the single-level pavilions under a roof terrace, children’s medicine and children’s surgery. Bands of coloured brick pick out the flat roofs and stress the horizontal lines. The ground falls 5.2 metres from north to south, and Horta used this to open some half-basements onto ground level.

Light matters in the design: operating theatres can be recognised from outside by their polygonal plan, which lets in as much light as possible, and the ward pavilions originally had sunny spaces furnished with deckchairs: gardens, patios, terraces and roof terraces. According to Horta’s own description, the windows of the wards provided 3.50 m² per bed.

The style is eclectic, tinged with Art Nouveau; Horta held that curves and rounded forms did not suit hospital architecture. A staircase in the pharmacy building nonetheless has a wrought-iron balustrade with Art Nouveau curves.

At the north-west corner of the site, the mortuary and chapel building has two levels under flattened roofs; its rectangular main body is extended by three apses. It is built of orange-red brick, with bluestone for the bases, columns and steps and white brick as decoration; a heptagonal wall, entirely glazed between cast-iron colonnettes, sits at the base of the axial apses. On the main floor, the chapel with two chancels served secular funeral services on the left and Catholic worship on the right, and a lift enclosed in mesh carried the bodies up. The chapel windows have hammered glass, clear or coloured, and some have stained glass.

This is the original site of CHU Brugmann, a public university hospital: renovated and equipped for present-day medicine, it has kept its pavilion layout, in an 18-hectare park. Nursing education has been present on the site since 1923.

As the hospital is in operation, its architecture is seen from outside. The main entrance is at 4 Place Arthur Van Gehuchten, in Laeken.