Page 158 - ELEMENTS EUROPA (EN)

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A bit like the Occidental Hotel, at the end of Amerika, Kafka’s unfinished
novel, the Europa building’s lifts operate the great theatre machinery
of which commissioners and ministers are temporary actors. The main
batteries, six or eight booths, are accommodated in the concrete centres
of the building’s primary structure, connecting the Residence Palace rows
to the rooms inside the lantern. No visual headroom towards the outside is
possible there. A triple artifice lets the confinement constraint be overcome:
booths are glazed; the entire surface of the sixty-metre high shafts is lit
and coated with the same polychromic patterns by Georges Meurant on all
three sides, also decorating ceilings, doors and floors, in the most prominent
spaces, from the bottom to the top of the building; the running of lifts
along the coloured patchwork walls has been conceived to turn this short
journey into a kinaesthetic experience. As for the landings, crowned with
suspended ceilings, they form a backlit plain glass layer and seem to ban
shadows and let lift booth decoration bathe in light. There is a prevailing
feeling of continuity in space, right from the building entrance all the way to
the corridors and office doors. The vertical scale of the building is obvious
at all times and the stratification of all eleven floors receives full alignment
and sectional view from the lantern’s curve, along the galleries and sets
surrounding it, that is narrower in middle floors and wider in lower and
upper floors. The general curve imposed by the ample or thin flanks of the
great plaster structure in the vertical plan matches the sets located at the
back of the lantern: curvilinear passageways following halls and vestibules
just outside the conference rooms or leading to meeting rooms and hidden
behind acoustic speakers of the north-western inner facade of the atrium.
Visual communication through circular shafts pierced between lower floors
contributes to this feeling of topological continuity and deliberate limitation
of repetition effects. According to the architect, there always is a landscape
to see and share between lifts, landings and galleries and the change of
floors is inscribed in the continuity of life.

Setting up the great polychromic frescoes inside the shafts, required
utmost care in mastering technical details. The artist carefully elaborated
his polychrome, which required the flatness of its support and perfectly
connected edges between its adjacent figures.