History

 “Through the entrance gate on the Heuvel, you walk on a monumental facade in modern style with a front width of 18 meters. The first striking feature is the spacious and fresh-looking facade in austere, yet "melodic" lines, with the large entrance to the new garage in the middle, adjacent to the old workshop at the back. The office space is still known on the left, although also very embellished and modernized, while on the right the day-and-night porter has his box.To the far right of this porter's lodge, lying in the corner and directly relative to the entrance to the street, a reduced edition of the Antwerp Schelde tunnel has been constructed in the form of a slowly sloping driveway to the first floor, where garage no. 2 is located above the entire surface of the ground-floor workfloor. Before entering the garage below, one enters between the office and the porter's lodge under a porch - indirectly lit at night - and the motorist does not get wet if sometimes late in the evening or on a rainy night he has to open the great double sliding doors himself. This door, a fine piece of work, so beautiful that it would look great in a winter garden in a large hotel, is the architect's own creation and construction and it is very gallant of him to remember that many ladies also drive cars and that is why he made sliding open this great, half-glass doors, so easy and so light that one can perform this "opening ceremony" with one finger. Behind this entrance, which houses toilets and an oil shop, one stands in front of a 60-metre deep space, adjacent to the workfloor near the Piusplein. Here, with a large central space, there is room for dozens of cars along the sides, while every lost corner is used again to store material. In the far right corner of the lower garage is an iron plate, under which is a large tank with funnel-shaped opening, above which the used and dirty oil from the cars is drained to a quantity of 5000 liters. The floor of this garage is made of "Silbit-carburundum", which in practice means that it is a completely non-slip substance. In the basement there are three boilers with a capacity for central steam heating of 400,000 calories and 200 meters of heated surface. The ramp to the upper garage is over 40 meters long and leads to an equally impressive space, to which — above the existing workfloor and therefore also overlooking Piusplein — a laundry and a hypermodern lubrication facility is connected to a warehouse for the larger parts.There are also four telescopic car lifters operating with air pressure.To prevent that a motorist, who has to park his car at the front, does not have to walk around the entire building again to go back down via the 'tunnel', there is a staircase at the front that leads to the entrance behind the porter's lodge at the bottom. The floor of the upper garage has many compartments of thick glass tiles, which allow daylight to pass downwards from the shed roof. Understandably, the latest gadgets have been applied in everything, such as protected contacts, watertight light points and so-called antinyt cables instead of rusting pipes. On the Julianastraat side — between the intact showroom and workshop, the large parts warehouse has been expanded considerably and here you can get everything that belongs to a Ford.”