Unitas Tuinwijk
Deurne, Antwerp, Belgium

When the Unitas Garden District was designed, Deurne was still an independent, rural municipality outside the Antwerp Brialmontwal. The rapid growth of Antwerp in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries caused increasing numbers of workers and servants to move in, seeking affordable housing. Aristocratic families who owned vast estates capitalized on this trend by converting their lands into building lots and building new streets on them. Thus the population of Deurne increased from 15,000 to nearly 50,000 between the two world wars. Together with the devastation caused by World War I, this created a growing housing shortage.

In 1914, the municipality of Deurne purchased the 18^th century castle and a portion (about 10 acres) of the accompanying Boekenberg estate with the intention of turning it into a public park. The remaining 20 acres were parcelled out. Thus, after the war, the idea arose in union circles to erect 1,000 to 1,500 social housing units south-east of the park. When that plan could not be implemented due to political disagreements, Adelbert Kennis and Edward Leonard took the initiative to establish a tenants' cooperative with the intention of having a new garden suburb built on this land. Kennis was vice president of Unitas, an association of office clerks with its own mutual and pension fund, hence the name of the district. Leonard was a clerk at the Gevaert photo company, architectural critic and editorial secretary of the Bouwgids. They became, respectively, the first president and business manager of the cooperative.

The Unitas Garden District was not a social housing district. Especially after the government removed subsidies for rental companies in 1923 and the tenants' cooperative was transformed into a buyers' cooperative, the houses became too expensive for working-class families. This was a consequence of the choice of the garden district concept, with private and communal green spaces occupying a not inconsiderable portion of the site. And then, of course, there is the architecture of Edouard Van Steenbergen, who resolutely opted for quality.

Four types of houses stand in groups amid the greenery: well-maintained front and back gardens overlooking Boekenberg Park. Very little has been changed on the facades over the course of last century, attesting to the quality of this architecture. The cheerful painting of the exterior joinery has sometimes had to give way to duller shades; the colour of the crépi is no longer the same everywhere. But the romantic atmosphere emanating from the irregular street plan with green spaces and slightly curved forms, the cottage style and the red tiled roofs, has lost none of its appeal.

In Unitasstraat, single-story half-width double houses overlook the park; on Adelbert Kennisplein, they face a lawn. On Oudedonklaan, the ground and second floors have the same width and the gabled roofs are connected. Some houses have one or two bay windows on the ground floor; in others, the living room window is in the plane of the front facade. This variety brings dynamism to the streetscape. Of all the garden districts in Antwerp, this is perhaps the most stylish, cherished by the government and by the residents. Originally these were owners of the wealthy middle class: civil servants, clerks and teaching staff.

As is also the case in many English garden suburbs, the uniformity of the (four types of) houses is broken up with subtle variations in materials, colours and shapes. This presupposes a customized, individual plan for each individual house. The horizontally divided windows with stained-glass windows, the hipped and pointed roofs and the many bay windows are clear references to the English cottage style. The emphasis on horizontal lines, the playful use of brick and the window frames set flush in the facade point to influence from the Dutch New Objectivity.