Dubbed “Europe”, the new building of the European Council is a modern embodiment of the image of a state institution in architecture and an example of a sustainable construction model. This "home of the European EU member states" emerged as a reaction to the need to hold meetings of the EU members in one place. Officials have been working here since January 2017.
This construction has been awaited for ten years; it was built with a delay of 21 months and with a seemingly increased budget. The total cost of the construction is 321 million euros, and the initial estimate is 240 million, but this was not an excess of the originally planned amount, but only a consequence of the indexation of the estimate taking into account inflation. Europa's original design led to construction delays as well as payment problems. However, the budget of the new headquarters of the European Union still turned out to be much more modest than the cost.
the new NATO building, located on the other side of Brussels: in his case, we are talking about an amount of about one billion euros.
Such cases have become common in the European context. Unrealistic forecasts of the cost and timing of construction are a common problem with government orders. It's enough to remember
the Paris Philharmonic of Jean Nouvel, undervalued three times, or the Philharmonic Herzog & de Meuron in Hamburg, the construction of which took seven years longer than planned. The demand for innovation and uniqueness, characteristic of such projects, usually arises on the basis of political ambitions that do not adequately predict costs or even force them to deliberately hide them. But more and more ambitious government orders are faced with the reality of the crisis, which casts doubt on this approach to architecture.
The increased spending on the building of the European Council did not escape the attention of Eurosceptics and became another reason for controversy in the press. For example, the German newspaper Bild condemned calls by EU President Herman Van Rompuy to save resources, which were made in parallel with the presentation of the building. For this reason, British publications have called the European Union "a bureaucratic body that spends extravagant sums"; the popular daily Daily Mail, which backed Brexit, did not appreciate this architectural novelty (and especially its cost), writing that "the building has become one of the most obvious symbols of waste." In 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron commented on the inappropriateness of the construction of this structure in the context of the crisis and took the initiative to freeze the EU budget for the implementation of such projects.
However, if we recall the background of the project, the idea of creating a new space for Council meetings did not come up yesterday, and the situation on the continent was completely different then. In 2001, EU member states, including Britain, which later condemned the project, supported the initiative to build a new headquarters for the Council. Its previous building, Justus Lipsius, is three times smaller than the new Europe: it was designed in the mid-1980s, when Jacques Chirac had not yet proposed to hold all the meetings in Brussels, and the EU was preparing to rise to 12 or even 15 members, but not up to 28.
But after the Nice Treaty in 2004, Brussels was officially designated the EU capital, and it became apparent that the city lacks the space for all the necessary activities. The Belgian state, as the customer, organized an international competition for the new building; in January 2005, 25 projects were selected, six of which reached the final. According to the results of the second stage of the competition, which lasted three months, the grandiose project of 71 thousand square meters was entrusted to the Belgian architects Philippe Samyn and partners in collaboration with the studio Valle Progettazioni (Italy) and engineers Buro Happold (Great Britain).
One of the competitive criteria was the project's compliance with the principles of sustainable development. “We had to design the project with an environmental awareness and at the same time create an architectural symbol,” Philippe Samen recalls. The image of the building is a "lamp in a glass lampshade," as the author dubbed his ellipsoidal volume inside a transparent cube, which illuminates the European Quarter at night in an unfortunate urbanized area. The headquarters are located in the "administrative ghetto", a vast monofunctional territory without a clear character, which extends over three square kilometers. 100 thousand Eurocrats work here every day. For the townspeople, this is a faceless part of Brussels, which suffers from a lack of originality, which is caused by the complete subordination of office architecture to financial considerations.
“As a rule, structures of this importance, for example, the White House, are placed at the base of a kilometer perspective, according to the Versailles principle. In the case of this project, the European Council decided to place the building in an architecturally unremarkable place. The building is located along the Rue de la Law (rue de Lois), which, it should be noted, is a "flow channel" for cars. It is a gesture of touching modesty,”says Samen.
The construction of this facility was a long and laborious process of rare complexity. At many stages, there was a search for original solutions. Thus, the building is equipped with various environmental components. The roof is completely covered with solar panels, a system for collecting and storing rainwater, which enters the sanitary facilities, has been created; in the interior, the level of humidity, lighting and air temperature are controlled by special equipment. The façade structure has been optimized, which reduces the amount of steel used by 30% compared to traditional solutions. It is not for nothing that Philippe Samen often recalls his dual profession - an architect and an engineer, noting that architecture is the art of engineering.
The building consists of two parts: as the architect explains, it was done in order to combine cultural heritage with modernity. The new building is adjacent to the renovated Art Deco historical monument - Résidence Palace. This unique residential complex of 180 luxury apartments, built in the 1920s by the Swiss architect Michel Polak, included many interesting "service facilities": a theater with 516 seats, a panoramic restaurant, meeting rooms, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a fencing hall and even a rooftop tennis court. In his project, Philippe Samen kept its original facades and part of the interiors. Inside the exquisite complex, he housed the office of the President of the European Union and the offices of national delegations.
"An architect's job is to organize the void that occurs during the construction process." The eight-level wings of the Résidence Palace are seven meters wide and form a wide square courtyard with a side of 70 meters. Following the restrictions prescribed for the site and the directions of the city plan, the architect filled the void between the two wings of the L-shaped block of the monument with a cubic volume. Then he delicately placed the ellipsoid in this cube; the void between these geometric bodies forms an atrium with the main vestibule and accommodates the transitions between the different levels.
According to Samen, the amphora-like shape of the "lamp" was dictated not by aesthetic preferences, but, above all, by functional and design constraints. “This form arose for two reasons: firstly, functional spaces … sometimes expand, sometimes decrease at different levels. … The narrow base of the luminaire is explained by the fact that we could not lean on the entire area of the site because of the Schumann railway tunnel passing nearby. " This volume is like a giant ballot box. Its narrow base is the minimum space required for a press conference room at level +1, and the smallest upper constriction is the dining room for 50 people at level +11. The widest level - +3 and +5 - is a large hall for 250 people.
From the outside, the building looks like atranslucent protective screen, behind which you can distinguish the contour of the "lamp", protected from external influences. The double façade made of extra-transparent glass is 2.70 meters thick: such a "buffer" maximally protects the interior from traffic noise and provides thermal insulation.
The outer shell is organized like a patchwork quilt: it consists of 3,750 wooden window frames that originate from the 28 countries that made up the European Union before the UK left the EU. The oak frames were collected during renovation or demolition at numerous construction sites in Europe and reused in Brussels. “These genuine old profiles have been sanded, cleaned, rebuilt, varnished and housed in large stainless steel frames (5.40m by 3.54m - ND note) to form the façade front. This is done to promote the idea of recycling materials, as well as a tribute to craft and cultural diversity in Europe,”explains Samen. The facade of the building symbolically embodies the idea of equal participation of all EU members in the management of the union and is intended to comply with the motto "unity in diversity".
“One of my main goals was to make this building fun, as structures of this purpose are usually pointlessly frightening,” the architect admits. Like the façade, the multi-colored coatings in the interior form the principle of a kaleidoscope. Interior decoration is the result of collaboration between an architect and an artist. “I decided to invite Georges Meuran to create a hymn to joy,” and also because of “his ability to combine squares, rectangles and color into a special alchemy that creates a space of friendliness and hospitality,” says Philippe Samen. "I wanted to cheer up the heads of state who come to Brussels to solve unsolvable puzzles." Curiously, a similar colored kaleidoscope was made
Rem Koolhaas 10 years ago in the project of the flag of Europe - based on the 28 flags of the EU member states.
One of the most important requirements for the project was to provide the building with the necessary level of security for holding events at the highest level. After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, new norms were introduced in state institutions of this type: for example, the first floor can no longer accommodate commercial functions, which, of course, forms the closed nature of the street. “Europa is definitely an attractive building, it is more fun than others, but it has the same disadvantages as all European institutions: it expresses a closed public space that shows the distance between the EU and its citizens,” says Marco Schmitt (Marco Schmitt), architect and member of the European Quarter Association in Brussels. He draws attention to the fact that the entrance to the building is narrow and arranged in the lowered part of the building, and the requirements to ensure security have prevailed over the provision of public space to the townspeople. Also, for security reasons, the building is closed to the public except once a year, in May - on the occasion of Europe Day.
The new headquarters of the European Council is an attempt to create a modern symbol of a state institution by means of architecture. Europe is now in a transitional stage, when the question of the image of the EU and its implementation is not fully defined. As noted in 2001
in his exploration of European identity, Rem Koolhaas, the “materialization” of Europe in Brussels occurs without a clear architectural purpose and aesthetic clarity; already at that time he indicated the absence of a powerful symbol. In the same study, Umberto Eco put forward a different version, preferring the idea of a “soft capital”: he compared the European Union to an information network, where Brussels plays the role of a server. “I find it funny when I hear that Brussels needs a big structure like the Colosseum or the Empire State Building! Europe must find a more horizontal language that reflects differences and dialogue between cultures, rather than the language of hierarchy,”Eco said.
On the other hand, Belgian graphic designer Eduard De Landtsheer expresses a different, more pragmatic opinion, in principle questioning ambitious projects: “Today Europe lacks strength in the face of a deep crisis. We will not find our face through the construction of grandiose monuments!"
