Seven and a half centuries of treating the sick, an abbey of Cistercian nuns next door, and then in 1982 it stopped. What took the buildings over was music and art.
At a glance
The Bijloke is a site on the edge of central Ghent where medical care was given for more than seven hundred and fifty years, from the thirteenth century, when a hospital moved out to the Bijlokemeersen pastures. An abbey of Cistercian nuns was built beside it. Healthcare ended on the site in 1982, and it became a campus of culture and education. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts — KASK — occupies the right-hand wing of the neo-Gothic hospital building by Adolphe Pauli.
Key facts
- The academy: founded in 1751 by the artist Philippe-Carel Marissal, by the school’s own account; Wikipedia gives 1748, for a drawing school Marissal ran at home
- Royal title: granted in 1771 by Empress Maria Theresa
- The site: a hospital from the thirteenth century, when it moved to the Bijlokemeersen pastures; a Cistercian abbey was built beside it
- Medical care on the site: for more than 750 years, ending in 1982
- Protected: listed as a site in 1980
- The building: KASK is in the right-hand wing of the neo-Gothic hospital by Adolphe Pauli
- Neighbours: the Royal Conservatory; both have been departments of HOGENT since 1995
- GPS: 51.0451, 3.7187 · Open in Google Maps
History
Medieval cities put their hospitals outside the walls, on open ground, for reasons of air and of fear. Ghent moved its hospital out to the Bijlokemeersen — the Bijloke meadows — in the thirteenth century, and a community of Cistercian nuns was established beside it to run it. The arrangement lasted, in one form or another, for seven and a half centuries.
The hospital was rebuilt in the nineteenth century by Adolphe Pauli, the Ghent architect of the period, in the neo-Gothic that a charitable institution was then expected to wear. Medicine left in 1982, and a site that had never been anything but a hospital had to become something else. It was listed in 1980, two years before the end, which is why the conversion kept the fabric.
What arrived was the arts. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, founded by Philippe-Carel Marissal in the middle of the eighteenth century and made royal by Maria Theresa in 1771, took the right-hand wing of Pauli’s hospital; the Royal Conservatory came too. Both became departments of the Ghent university college in 1995.
A ward is a studio
Nineteenth-century hospital wings convert well to teaching. They were built long and narrow with windows on both sides, because before antibiotics light and moving air were the treatment, and the same section makes a good studio. The conversion of the Bijloke is one of the better examples in Belgium of a building type outliving its purpose without losing its shape.
What you see
Brick ranges around courtyards on open ground near the Leie, with the pointed openings and stepped gables of Pauli’s neo-Gothic, and older abbey fabric among them. The whole site is protected, so the arts campus reads as what it is: a medieval hospital precinct that kept being added to for seven centuries and then changed use.
This page has no photograph yet
We publish only images we are allowed to publish, and we have found no freely licensed photograph of these buildings. The page is written but not finished. If you are at KASK, or hold a picture of the Bijloke we may publish, send it and we will put it at the head of this page, with any others in a gallery below, credited exactly as you ask.
Sources & resources
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →📷 Become a Cultural Heritage Online photographer
Share your photos of places: they stay published under your name as the author. The more they're seen, the more you get noticed — and soon a contest will reward the most appreciated photos.
Log in or sign up free to add a photo