I spent a day in Brussels a while back, pre-pandemic. I walked through the city center taking photographs on the late afternoon and evening of the day I arrived, and then most of the next day. In looking through the photographs from my brief explorations of the city, the images that interested me the most were straight-on shots of smaller old facades. Brussels has many old and historic buildings with impressive facades – tall, elegant townhomes lining narrow streets, as well as the huge ornate buildings with fantastic stonework set around the expansive square of the Grote Markt (Grand Place). It was simpler structures, though, that drew my eye. Some of these buildings and their settings intrigued me enough to return to photograph them in a different light. The late-day light upon my arrival was soft and diffuse. Photographing from an elevated plaza, the light allowed for composing shots of close-by modest facades against the faded backgrounds of distant fine-textured cityscapes. The following morning the sun was strong – revealing the details of aging materials, the shadowed depth of doors and windows, and the faint writing you could just make out in signs painted on the facades long ago.
Straight-on photographs of buildings can be composed and edited to create very two-dimensional images – elements are compressed onto a narrow plane. The image becomes something different than just a photograph of a building – it becomes a composition of geometrical shapes, colors and textures, bright and shadowed surfaces. I’ve done that with some of these images. When you transform a building in that way, into a two-dimensional composition, it can be a bit mesmerizing to look at – for me, anyway! The mind works to interpret the image. It is not only a building, but something other than a building, as well – a collage of elements presented in the guise of a building.
Close by Hallepoort, a medieval gate to the city, the front of a closed restaurant provides strong colors and a fanciful seascape against the otherwise dull company of its neighboring buildings. The deep scalloped shadows of the awnings above mimic the blue waves and sails in the cutouts of the sign. Torn black and white posters, a yellow window box, wrinkled black shades in the window above – lots of detail to examine!On a street below the huge Palais de Justice this modest corner building presents a range of soft browns and whites in the sharp morning light. Water stains, faded whitewash, and bits of graffiti help create the composition. The sun has turned the corner onto Rue de l’Épée on the left, just grazing the slightly uneven building surfaces. An old gaslight on a bracket projecting from the facade adds an ornate touch.This is another composition created by strong sun on an aging facade. Bright white window and door recesses contrast with sharp black shadows. Stone and plaster repairs in shades of dark grey surround the windows. Green and orange boards add touches of color at the door. You can just make out the words on the faded painted sign. Three slender black bollards repeat the cadence of black reinforcing irons bolted to the structure above the windows.This view of the upper facade of an old building below the Palais de Justice was fascinating to me, set against the more distant textures of the city extending back from it. The dark squarish windows, the old clay tile roof, and the solid symmetry of the thing, seems to convey a character of stubborn permanency against the color-faded fine-grained patterns of the cityscape behind it.An aging gable of mottled brown plaster is set against the cityscape beyond. The closing up of a window has upset the original symmetry, leaving one lone window – but the patch of darker grey plaster and its rough edges adds an interesting element. It relates to the grey plaster of the added geometry of the chimney on the far left. At the chimney on the right the glazed flue pots project upward and the spalling plaster reveals the red brick structure. A white-framed bay window in the upper story of a townhouse, photographed from an elevated point across the street. It’s not a symmetrical facade, but the various elements around the window make for an interesting composition, with mottled stone (or plaster?) details, the neighboring banded brick around greenish tinted windows, and the interesting design detail in the ironwork above the bay. The upper stories of this group of townhouses present a jumble of shapes and materials and textures. Each has its own idea of what a cornice should look like, and the middle two went their own way with dark red brick facades. It looks like there’s been some reconstruction on that red brick, and the new windows in both are glazed with mirrored glass. Look closely to see the reflected elements of the building across the street. They are at the base of the Palais de Justice, where I was standing when I took the photograph.The still-glossy grey roof tiles in this new construction provide a sharp mechanical foreground texture against the softer less distinct details of the cityscape stretching beyond. The nature of the light at the moment created the contrast in this somewhat monochromatic image. I was back the next day and the scene looked completely different, having lost the contrasting textures.Looking down a steep small street, a series of three facades across from a small sculpture garden at the Royal Fine Arts Museums is compressed into a two-dimensional arrangement of shapes and textures. The black brick of the rounded building contrasts with two faces of red brick to the right. The black and red brick surfaces become flattened rectangles of textures adjacent to the white plaster on the left that is punctured by window elements. This is not a small facade, but the light in this photograph so nicely captured the monumentality of the edge of this projecting train platform at the Gare du Midi (named after a region in Southern France) that I had to include it in the group. The projection and its robuts supporting columns extend for almost a kilometer, about a quarter of a mile. The dark shadows, the rails in the street, and the black steel towers above all extend into the distance along with the platform. The red-banded traffic signal pole, the yellow cone, and the black and white stripes of the crosswalk add a bit of contrasting detail.
