Startseite Geschichte Architectures of Bureaucracy
book: Architectures of Bureaucracy
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Architectures of Bureaucracy

The Politics of Government Office Buildings in Interwar Belgium
  • Jens van de Maele
Sprachen: Englisch, Deutsch
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 2025
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Über dieses Buch

This monograph examines the interrelationship between politics and modernist architecture in interwar Belgium, focusing on political, architectural, and administrative elites as propagators of new ideas of governance. While Belgium was strongly influenced by neighbouring France and Germany, it also developed its own avant-garde approaches to socio-political problems. In the second half of the 1930s, the country was the scene of a remarkable political and architectural experiment involving an ambitious plan for the large-scale construction of modernist government office buildings. These buildings were seen as essential to the development of a technocratic model of governance, aimed at strengthening the role of the executive and minimising the influence of parliament. More specifically, the “efficient” new office architecture was supposed to create a new type of “perfect” civil servant, whose loyalties would no longer lie with political parties, but with scientists and management experts. Such experts and scientists constituted a rising elite of homines novi with strong (though often veiled) political ambitions. As such, this book contributes to our understanding of political culture in the “age of extremes”.

Information zu Autoren / Herausgebern

Jens van de Maele, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.

Informationen zur Veröffentlichung
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
eBook veröffentlicht am:
27. Januar 2025
eBook ISBN:
9783111553894
Gebunden veröffentlicht am:
27. Januar 2025
Gebunden ISBN:
9783111552934
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
Frontmatter:
8
Inhalt:
294
Abbildungen:
75
Heruntergeladen am 27.9.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111553894/html
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