Language Crisis
Louvain-la-Neuve was born as a result of the Leuven Crisis.
Following the elections prompted by this affair, the expansion of the French-speaking part of the University was voted upon and approved on 18 June 1968. A few weeks later, the separation of the Catholic University of Leuven was made official. It resulted in the creation of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), the Dutch-speaking one, that would stay in Leuven, and the Université Catholique de Louvain, which had to move to the future site of Louvain-la-Neuve, except for the French-speaking medical faculty, which moved to Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, in the suburbs of Brussels.
The first blueprints of Louvain-la-Neuve were made in a hurry and under dramatic times. Put under the direction of Raymond Lemaire, Jean-Pierre Blondel and Pierre Laconte, this urbanistic project saw the first students arrive in 1972.
Read more about this topic: Louvain-la-Neuve
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or crisis:
“The “sayings” of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech—it is a gift from heart to heart.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“We can’t afford the wrath of Heaven. We survived a deluge by the skin of our teeth, but an economic crisis would be disastrous.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)