Building for Belgium

How Belgium’s decentralised embassy building programme highlights the collaborative nature and diplomatic significance of embassy architecture.

Embassy buildings are the most tangible evidence of a state’s diplomatic presence abroad. State authorities have invested in the architectural conception of purpose-built embassies to flex their diplomatic muscle and project nationhood on foreign soil. While scholars have primarily focused on purpose-built embassies of (former) world powers, Building for Belgium shifts the perspective by scrutinising the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ embassy-building programme from 1945 to 2020.

Rather than a conventional political assessment of diplomatic relations, the book foregrounds the often-overlooked architectural lives of embassies and their social, economic, and political entanglements. By examining Belgian embassy projects across all continents, it reveals how the Belgian diplomatic corps has navigated diverse political regimes, geopolitical contexts, cultures, and building codes. More than the outcome of a deliberate policy, the embassy-building programme has been shaped by incidental decisions, private ambitions and personal tastes of Belgian diplomats, ministry officials and politicians.

Building for Belgium not only sheds light on diplomatic architecture but also connects domestic conversations about architecture in Belgium with global state-building projects. Offering fresh insights into the politics of space, it will be of value to scholars and practitioners in architecture, urban studies, international relations, cultural heritage, and Belgian and European studies.

Foreword by Mark Eyskens
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes regarding the maps and the monetary values used in the book

Introduction

Chapter I. The Ambassador’s Agency: The Head of Mission as Project Developer (1945-1957)

Chapter II. Building Embassies on Demand: The Steering Role of the Receiving State (1958-1974)
A. Building an Embassy in the Land Down Under: Diplomatic Housing as Political Leverage
B. The Reconstruction of the Mniszech Palace: The Diplomatic Cornerstone of Belgian-Polish Relations
C. Building in Brasília, Brazil: Moving Out of One’s Comfort Zone

Chapter III. “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”: Constructing Embassies as Venues for Economic Diplomacy (1980-1985)
Chapter IV. Plugging the Holes in the Federal Budget: Monetising the Belgian Embassy Patrimony (1999-2020)
A. Redeveloping the Belgian Embassy Grounds in Japan: A Public-Private Partnership
B. Diplomatic Co-housing: The Kinshasa Project

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Bram De Maeyer

Bram De Maeyer is an architectural historian interested in diplomatic architecture. He is a voluntary researcher at the Faculty of Architecture (KU Leuven), where he earned his PhD in 2023.