Braem left Antwerp's Royal Academy in 1935 with a linear-city project stretched between Antwerp and Liège, won the Prix Godecharle on the strength of it, and spent 1936 and 1937 in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier. He joined CIAM in 1937 and held to the Athens Charter longer than most of his generation: separated functions, slabs raised on pilotis, green space running underneath and between. Antwerp gave him the commissions that made his name — the Kiel housing units, the police tower left over from an unbuilt administrative centre, the Arena sports hall — and in 1968 he published a polemic, The Ugliest Country in the World, attacking Belgian building culture wholesale. His later work loosens into curves, colour and sculptural concrete.
