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EUROPA
2013.04.17
The transparency remains relative: the rooms are kept hidden from view. But
movement, on the other hand, can be seen, especially the stairs and the corridors
that lead to the interpreter booths. Again, skilful engineering was used to make
the thinnest sections possible, i.e., on the perimeter, the stairs are slender, they
do not weigh down the floors, they hang between two perforated steel sheets.
The emergency staircase against the lantern’s façade can fulfil its role and does
not clash with the architecture. White lighting, placed on the reveals of the verti-
cal interior mullions on the lantern’s wall, in the form of LEDs, makes the lantern
glow day and night. The glass and metal mass of this strange object is perceived,
it is not suffered.
The belly of the lantern? Rabelais’ or Alfred Jarry’s paunchy figures? Or else the
curvaceous bodies of Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculptures, whom Philippe Samyn
hugely admires? Wonderful plasticity or surrealist inspiration? The elegant glass
cladding does not keep us from feeling a touch of grotesque that sometimes
strikes the greatest works of art, like a vague recollection of the purgatory spheres
of The
Garden of Earthly Delights/Jardin des délices.
There is hidden humour
hidden behind this triple crown formed by the rooms where the leaders of Euro-
pean politics will convene. There is something amusing about the rising move-
ment of these calculated geometries, i.e., cone trunks generating curves with a
double focus, radiating decks, cladding with milky chevrons, arched trapezoids
and lop-sided columns. The lantern’s shapes literally overflow with assumed ten-
sions, agreed audacity, respected decorum.
GLASS ELLIPSES
