on superficiality and blérot

Anita and I are flat-hunting at the moment. We like Schaerbeek but just need a change I guess.

Yesterday's apartment in St-Gilles looked very promising. A semi-art nouveau block of apartments designed by none other the master of tasteful squiggliness Ernest Blérot.

Blérot definitely put his soul into producing a patina of subdued opulence. The apartment was small but good enough for us. Just one (major) problem: the kitchen/bathroom. Apartments with a bath installed in the kitchen aren't rare in old Brussels apartment blocks but they usually have some sort of wall or divider of some sort between the two.

This one didn't. You could literally stand in the bath, butt naked with shampoo on your hair (and on your chest hair if you're particularly hairy) and fry some sardines or prepare a sunday roast. Practical, but aesthetically - and logistically - strange.

The thing that struck me the most was how superficial the building was. Couldn't he have spared five minutes from his recurrent thoughts on stone noodling, squiggles and outweirding Victor Horta to ask the builders to build a wall between the two? I'm an upholder of the virtues of superficiality. I think too many people disregard what seems to be superficial to get to the internal part, losing an important part of the object or subject itself in the process. I happen to like surfaces and surfaces condition my choices as much as much as the actual content does, but in some way this Blérot building went too far considering external factors rather than what will actually be in the building itself. Or maybe it's a bold aesthetic statement I didn't quite understand. Maybe since Victor Horta was reputedly an eccentric heavy drug user (stories on how an arsenal of marijuana, opium and magic mushrooms were found in his cellar after his death abound) and Blérot was just a quiet catholic, middle-class architect he felt he just had to outweird him in some other way.

A couple (Brussels apartment viewing is like a bit like an offbeat auction... you're never alone in the apartment) just walked in, recoiled in horror at this odd setup and walked out again without uttering a single word. I'm reasonably sure Blérot would have been amused...