In the past, abbeys and monasteries were built in a single, homogeneous style, but that was not the case at the Abbey of Westvleteren.
From old to contemporary
Of the 19th-century buildings only the better ones were kept: the old church (1848) and the Old Gatehouse (1878).
The rest was demolished and rebuilt each time in a different style: the guesthouse, the church, the living quarters for the brothers and the brewery.
The result: an amalgam.
Architecturally this can be interesting, as we may note in all modesty at Saint Sixtus Abbey. The architect b0b Van Reeth put it this way: “The task is to conceive buildings in which time, just like form and material, is built in.”
Over the years several architects have shown their craft. We should like to name two remarkable master builders: Arthur Degeyter (1919-2004) and b0b Van Reeth (1943-2025).
In 1968 the architect Arthur Degeyter designed the present church. He succeeded in giving form to an authentic contemporary Cistercian architecture. Valuable architecture that bears witness to a natural self-evidence, and that strikingly holds its own against the test of time. The high stained-glass windows were conceived by the artist and glazier Michel Martens and the sculptor Roger Bonduelle. Without telling a story, they frame the sky, in all sobriety and simplicity.
At the community’s request, the architect b0b Van Reeth designed the brothers’ living quarters between 2008 and 2011. What arose was an honest and shared working process, of thinking together and of research through design. An architecture that knows how to safeguard silence and solitude, without setting out after new forms. The commission as a search.
With his outspoken views, b0b Van Reeth said of the considered but sober result: “Contemporary architecture is not the extraordinary, but the ordinary”, and also “Simplicity is compressed complexity”.
The elementary design for the small pilgrims’ chapel, adjoining the monastery, sums all this up seamlessly. A primitive hut, as a protective shell for an uplifting Madonna, by the visual artist Philip Aguirre y Otegui.
“An act of courage and of faith in the future”, is how the architecture critic Geert Bekaert described the renewed abbey of Westvleteren. An abbey that is, and will remain, in evolution. Timeless and dear.
An abbey that is and will remain
in evolution.
