Plastic Fantastic

The material may be synthetic but the value of Philippe Decelle’s shrine to plastic is very real

Hidden behind a plain and unmarked façade near St Catherine lies one of the world’s foremost collections of plastic design, the Plasticarium. Its owner, the artist Philippe Decelle, began collecting in back in 1983. “I saw this Joe Colombo chair that had been thrown away and I couldn’t believe it.” Determined to save the “creativity of a whole generation” from oblivion, he started to hoard the plastic furniture, design and art that has come to be seen as emblematic of the sixties.

“At the time, no on was interested in plastic,” Decelle recalls. “Dealers would refer to me as that crazy guy in Brussels.” Not so anymore.  With time, and after publishing a seminal book on plastic, people started to take interest. Prices for plastic design have since shot up.

In 1993, to display his ever-growing collection to the public, Decelle bought up an old warehouse belonging to a funerary business. “They sold porcelain angels, crowns, wreaths, that kind of thing,” he says, surrounded by Technicolor sea of plastic. Now, all of the sixties seems to have wound up in there. There’s clean post-war design from Italy, psychedelic carpets, a pop-art sofa in the form of a baseball glove, at least one futuristic television from Japan, to name but a few objects of the hundreds that are piled high over the building’s 500m2.

“25 years of my life,” insists Decelle, “it’s hard to estimate the value of having brought it all together,” or the time it must have taken him, pursuing forgotten masterpieces across Europe or restoring works discarded as rubbish. Now Decelle, who guides visitors through the collection, would like to see the collection taken on by the Belgian state as a museum; a testimony to a radical age, but also to the vision, dedication and humanity of a quite singular man.

The Plasticarium

Visits upon reservation: 0477584554