The man who helped invent Art Nouveau was given an eight-hundred-year-old abbey to put a modern school in. It is still there.
At a glance
La Cambre is an abbey in Ixelles, in Brussels, founded in 1201 and emptied by the French in 1796. For most of the nineteenth century its buildings were put to whatever use the city needed. In 1926 the Belgian state gave them to Henry van de Velde, who opened a school of applied and visual arts in them. The school is still in the abbey today, under the name École nationale supérieure des arts visuels, and shares the site with the national geographic institute.
Key facts
- Abbey founded: 1201, by Gisèle, on land given by Duke Henry I of Brabant; a community of Cistercian nuns
- Recognised: in 1202 by the Bishop of Cambrai
- Suppressed: 1796, under French rule; the buildings later served as a military academy, a cotton mill and a poorhouse
- School authorised: November 1926, by Camille Huysmans, Minister of Arts and Sciences
- Founder: Henry van de Velde, as the Institut supérieur des Arts décoratifs
- Today: École nationale supérieure des arts visuels (ENSAV La Cambre), alongside the Institut géographique national
- GPS: 50.8200, 4.3749 · Open in Google Maps
History
Duke Henry I of Brabant gave the land to a woman named Gisèle in 1201, and she founded a house of Cistercian nuns there. The Bishop of Cambrai recognised it the following year. The abbey lasted almost six centuries, until the French suppressed it in 1796.
What followed is the ordinary afterlife of a confiscated monastery. The buildings became a military academy, then a cotton mill, then a poorhouse: a cloister is a useful shape, and nobody was precious about it. That century of hard use is the reason the site survived at all.
In November 1926 Camille Huysmans, then Minister of Arts and Sciences, authorised a new school and gave it the abbey. Its founder was Henry van de Velde. He hired his first teachers in May 1927 and enrolled eighty students that autumn. The first architects graduated in 1930. Van de Velde resigned as director in 1936.
In 1980 the school was divided in two: the visual arts stayed as ENSAV, the architecture side became a separate institute, which ended in 2009 when Belgian architecture schools were absorbed into the universities. The visual arts school never moved. It is in the abbey still.
The founder
Henry van de Velde was sixty-three when he was given the abbey. He belonged to the generation that made Art Nouveau in Brussels in the 1890s, and he had spent the years before the First World War in Germany, where he directed the arts and crafts school at Weimar until 1915. La Cambre was his last school, and the one he kept longest.
What you see
Brick and pale stone ranges around courtyards, stepped down a slope towards a pond and formal gardens, with the abbey church on the high side. The conventual wings that held the nuns now hold studios and workshops. The result is a working art school with the plan of a monastery: cells become studios, the cloister becomes a corridor, and the proportions stay monastic.
Sources & resources
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