National Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg
Art Deco national shrine crowned by a soaring dome, built over sixty five years across two world wars.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg opens with cabbages growing inside a half-built cathedral and a cage of snakes once displayed under its unfinished dome, then rewinds to 1905, when King Leopold II laid the first stone for a soaring neo-Gothic shrine. It follows how money and then a world war stalled the project, and how an obscure Ghent architect named Albert Van Huffel scrapped the Gothic towers for a radically modern Art Deco design that Belgians first mocked as cheap. Van Huffel's model went on to compete at the 1925 Paris exhibition, and a second war later turned this same hilltop into a vegetable garden.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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