Starts and Stops

The citation of a building, like naming a person, is typically followed by the bracketed years of its construction. When the building no longer exists, these years span its birth to death or beginning to end. Buildings such as Victor Horta’s Maison du Peuple, which could be dated as (1896–1899) (1899–1965) (1899–1965, 2000–) or simply (1899–), complicate this convention. Detecting the exact start or end of Maison du Peuple, a reasonably simple question for which to seek an answer, remains difficult. Maison du Peuple was demolished in 1965—save the main banquet hall, the cafe, and a staircase which were marked, disassembled, and stored until plans for their use could be finalized. Most of these plans never materialized. Instead, pieces of Maison du Peuple, totalling 130 tonnes of material, disappeared to disparate locations. 70 tons of building elements were sold to a scrap dealer. Twelve truckloads were distributed to a museum and two municipalities. A number of stone and iron pieces simply sunk into the swamp-like field where they were stored and countless elements were looted from open storage in vacant lots. Remnants of Horta’s masterpiece currently lay dormant in the cellar of the Saint-Gilles town hall, the backyard of the Horta Museum, a cafe in the centre of Antwerp, the Brussels Comic Strip Centre, and in an underground tram station at the corner of Chaussée de Waterloo and Rue du Lycée, Brussels. Since 2000, parts of the pre-fabricated structure have been reconstituted into a cafe and event venue. This paper traces the post-demolition appropriations of Maison du Peuple which extend the building’s ending far beyond its demolition.