Varendonk Town Hall – Laakdal

Small yet simple modern town hall. Let’s hear from Jozef Schellekens:

“I had to design a town hall that, although the costs could not exceed the price of a small worker’s house, would give a monumental impression through its exterior forms.

I studied this small design very seriously. I designed a relatively wide but very shallow building and placed no windows in the façade, but decorated it only with a simple front with double doors. The façade would then be painted white. This gave the façade a grander character because, if windows were to be placed in it, those windows would certainly make the façade smaller and more fragmented…”

F. VANSCHOONBEEK, an Architectural-Historical Study of the Figure of Jozef Schellekens (1909-1963), Bachelor Thesis Art Sciences and Archaeology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2012