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the forced integration into an existing structure. Philippe Samyn does not mind
admitting it: the presence of the new headquarters is modest, even incongruous.
He sees in it the desire of the Belgian State and European Union to construct it
without fuss or staging as had been a matter of course in the history of Brussels
town planning in order to satisfy the real estate needs of the European institu-
tions.
Behind the patchwork façades, a tall atrium surrounds the section of the building
intended for conferences and ceremonies, which in turn rests, like an engaged
column, on the recreated floor decks of the old building. The atrium surrounds as
much as it is surrounded, it is an empty space under the glass roofs that glorifies
the intervals between the project’s components. It is part of the typological his-
tory of modern atria. By the construction next to a major road, with its cubic vol-
umetry, with the profile of a double transparent façade placed at an angle to the
street, with its height (eleven levels above the ground floor), the whole building
has a silhouette that recalls the Ford Foundation Headquarters by Kevin Roche
John Dinkeloo Associates (1968), in New York [see this building’s critical reap-
praisal, recently provided by the architect Lebbeus Woods:
.
wordpress.com/2011/02/27/rethinking-roche/], despite all the differences. The
construction choices are not the same, the building is topped with a heavy en-
tablature in New York; with a pergola and a grid of solar panels in Brussels. No
recycling of old materials infuse the puritanical façades of the New York building
with their historical flavour or their poetic composite. Be that as it may, the two
institutions, in each case, represent a beacon on the street corner and provide
their respective interior spaces with an urban scale conducive to dialogue with
its surroundings. Beyond this similarity in scale and minimum distance between
buildings to allow for unimpeded views, the difference is obvious, i.e., the build-
ing designed by Philippe Samyn neither creates plain walls from the ground up
nor builds balconies above a central void. It rather has its atrium radiate from a
pivotal object – a glass courtyard wraps itself around a circular central volume,
which breaks the orthogonality and vertical drop of the peripheral façades. The
atrium is used as a reception and traffic space, in a composition that inserts an
oval curve within a square plane.
The double glass façade protects this massive lobby against the pollution from
the street, without breaking with it visually. Urban continuity is contrasted here
with the deviation of the atrium theme, as is the case each time an interior emp-
ty space becomes confined by buildings that are excessively hermetic. Rem
Koolhaas once stressed the deleterious role of atria designed by John Portman
in Atlanta, Georgia, i.e., instead of an opening in the building to allow air and light
to enter, the atrium has become an enclosed void, sealed against the real, i.e.,
opaque to all urban life. The atrium of luxury hotels, condominiums, shopping
centres: an ersatz centre, the disintegration of the city in favour of a hideous ar-
chitectural mishmash: “the more these autonomous shapes are ambitious, writes
Koolhaas, the more they undermine the true centre – its disorder, its complexity,
its irregularities, its density, its ethnic diversity” [“Atlanta”,
in
Rem Koolhaas
et al.,
SMLXL,
1995, p. 843].
The façades of the Atrium
The façades of the atrium close the
L-shaped cube formed with the existing
building. They are made up of an internal
supporting façade and an external façade
suspended from it. The façade only sits on
the ends on the
Rue de la Loi
side. With a
reach of 48.60 m, it also supports part of
the ground floor, which is independent
from the tunnel cover. The façade is made
up of rectangular modules measuring
5.40 m in length and 3.54 m in height, with
diagonal bracing. This geometry generates
a very high level of hyperstatic forces that
make the façade highly rigid in its plane, as
the whole, in reconstructed profiles with
a uniform depth of 30 cm, is completely
welded. The greatest lightness is achieved
by varying both the thickness of the flat
sides and the width of the profiles depend-
ing on the stress they have to absorb. This
allows to read the trajectory of the forces
in the steel structure. The internal façade
on the
Justus Lipsius
side sits on seven
posts of which any single one can disap-
pear after an explosion without affecting
the structure’s stability.
Dr
philippe samyn
, engineer
THE CONCOURSE IN BETWEEN
