Page 157 - ELEMENTS EUROPA (EN)

ELEMENTS EUROPA 153

5 MECHANICAL MANOEUVRING

Twenty lifts (including goods lifts) make vertical circulation of people and
supplies possible. They make mechanical movements visible and they are
to the building what air conditioning is to its atmosphere. Not only service
spaces, to put it in Louis I. Kahn’s words, but real intermediary elements
and mobile plates: staging the protocol of comings and goings between
floors, between buildings (two footbridges connect the Europa building to
the former Consilium building, says Justus Lipsius), between the inside and
the outside. Offices, commissions, councils, meetings, press conferences,
receptions, meals… On top of meetings between leaders, daily routine
inside the Europa building consists of national delegation and presidency
secretariat members of personnel moving about at all times. Let us not
forget that the presidency is a rotating one (every six months, each EU
Member State takes in turn assuming this function), as the appointed
President’s mandate lasts for two and a half years, renewable once… Said
President of the Council of Europe (Mr Donald Tusk since 1st December
2014) is supposed to make his or her prerogatives agree with the European
Commission President’s (Mr Jean-Claude Juncker since 1st November
2014, for a five-year mandate, renewable once), according to a distribution
the applicable Lisbon Treaty kept vague. Together with the leading function
rotation, the intricacy of responsibilities does not make the political message
sent out to European citizens any simpler. The Europa building’s architecture
seems to want to turn such complexity into functional schemes, to
depict and add colour to it. Continuous movements inside the building,
between theatre settings and mechanical automatons, will look like a ballet
production by Oscar Schlemmer!