There is an interesting exhibition currently on show at the Brussels Bozar cultural centre that got me thinking about a rarely-explored aspect of the European Union. Entitled "A vision for Brussels" the show tries to analyse why the EU has generally produced such dismal buildings for its institutions - and examines ways of improving the Union’s poor architectural record.

As any visitor to Brussels’ European quarter can testify, there is little that is beautiful or inspiring about the headquarters of the European Commission, the European Council or the European Parliament. The first two are housed in vast, anonymous blocks of stone and glass, while the Parliament is housed in a megalomaniac, post-modernist nightmare that arrogantly dwarfs the tranquil surroundings of the Place Luxembourg.

Perhaps even worse than the individual buildings, the EU has so far paid little or no respect to the urban environment in which it has dropped its shoe boxes.

The architects behind the Brussels exhibition - who hail from the respected Rotterdam-based Berlage Institut - have one radical suggestion to improve this sorry state: for starters, they call for the demolition of the European Parliament.

They also want to move the bureaucrats working at the European Council into the 19th century war museum just up the road, while the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters would be surrounded by new housing blocks in an effort to inject some life into an area that is as dead as a cemetery at night and on weekends.

The general idea of the Berlage architects is to spread the EU institutions all over the Belgian capital: the Parliament would be moved to a brown field site a few kilometres away from its current location, a new EU university would be located in the south of the city while the institutions’ libraries and other support services would find a new home in the western fringes of Brussels. Some of the designs for the new buildings are striking and clever, though others made me wonder whether they would work as well in reality as they do on paper.

There is, of course, no chance that these ambitious plans will ever be put into practice. But the fact that Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt were present during the opening gives cause for hope that the city and the EU itself may be starting to think seriously about the issue. At the very least, one would hope that any new constructions will be tackled with more thought - and a greater awareness of the EU’s impact on the urban landscape - than has been the case so far.

April 10th, 2007 in Brussels | Permalink