Abstract

The Palais des Académies – an Urban Residence Gift of the Belgians, to the Prince of Orange. The Palais des Académies, which stands next to the Royal Palace, was originally not devoted to house the Royal Academies of Belgium. It was erected between 1823 and 1828 as the urban residence of the Prince of Orange, United Kingdom of the Netherlands’s Crown Prince. It is usually assumed that the king would have built this building to expose his son as a sort of regent in Brussels, to symbolize the royal authority when he himself resided in The Hague. This is not the case, on the contrary. The palace was given to the prince by the States General / États Généraux against the will of his father, king William I. Officially the parliament made this gesture as a recognition for the heroic conduct of the prince at the battle of Waterloo. But in reality the representatives expressed by this exceptional act, the warm sympathy of the Belgian people for the crown prince, while aiming to establish him as a viceroy in Brussels, awaiting his accession to the throne. The design of the palace was entrusted to Charles Vander Straeten, a Brussels architect trained in the classicist spirit of J. N. L. Durand. He succeeded in incorporating the complex program into a rational and clear plan, expressed in a simple classicist architecture, typical of the late empire style. The interior of the palace was fundamentally transformed in 1860. It was restored in 1969-1976.

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