Ancient and modern

Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions
Museum Leuven, until 6 December

Musée Hergé
Louvain-la-Neuve

When I was a child in Belgium, architecture was a dirty word — angry drivers would wind down their windows and yell, ‘Architecte!’ The insult dated back to the 19th century, when the megalomaniac architect Joseph Poelaert imposed the enormity of the Palais de Justice on Brussels, forcing large numbers of residents from their homes.

Times change and memory fades; architects are back in favour in Belgium. Last week saw the inauguration of Santiago Calatrava’s new birdcage-roofed station at Liège-Guillemins, hailed as a destination in itself — not a description you’d use, unfortunately, of the Eurostar terminal at Bruxelles Midi. In June, two new museums to famous Belgians opened, both designed by Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc: the Musée Magritte inside the gutted Hôtel Altenloh in Place Royale, just up the road from Poelaert’s Palais, and the Musée Hergé, 20 miles south of Brussels in the French-speaking new university town of Louvain-la-Neuve.

Last Sunday a third new museum building joined the throng in the Dutch-speaking medieval university town of Leuven, where Belgian architect Stéphane Beel has expanded the 19th-century Vander Kelen-Mertens museum into a cuboid white travertine and glass extension. Anything further from the stone lacework of Leuven’s late-Gothic Town Hall would be hard to imagine. From behind the neoclassical peristyle of the library it replaces, Leuven’s reinvented museum — rechristened ‘M’ — makes the blunt unequivocal statement, ‘the white box has landed’. The plan was to create a museum space where ancient and modern could meet on equal terms. It faces a major test in its first exhibition, Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions.

Despite his name, Rogier van der Weyden was not a famous Belgian.