In 1885 he became Director for the Ministry of Public Works in West Flanders, and four years afterward also achieved the post of Professor of Construction, Material Strength, and Structural Engineering at the Université catholique de Louvain.

[1] For the 1897 World Fair at Brussels he built a 31.5m span bridge at his own expense and loaded to show the correlation between measurement and his numerical analysis.

[1][2] His work, Cours de stabilité des constructions (1889) was an important reference during more than half a century.

[citation needed] He retired as director of public works in West Flanders in 1927, and as Professor at Leuven Catholic University in 1936.

[1] He emphasised an importance of aesthetics over pure engineering: Pour les constructions métalliques les dimensions doivent être déterminées à priori par des considérations esthétiques et qu’après seulement il y a lieu de recourir à la formule mathématique.