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ELEMENTS EUROPA THE BAROQUE ELLIPSE AND ITS TWISTS AND TURNS 61

cosmological and aesthetical concepts is undermined owing to the shape
of the lantern’s piled-up planes. But the outlines of geometry do not turn
to architecture without stirring many memories or conveying genealogical
values. That power to evolve and the flourishing of drawings are the very
essence of architecture. The difficulty in conceiving of built edifices must be
acknowledged: the latter are strong and rich with more reasons and ideas
than before they were completed as there never were at the various stages
of their conception. The combined effects of construction, reception and
usage are not wholly foreseeable or representable in the visual anticipations
to which even the most talented draughtsman could come up with.
Architecture is a memory of shapes and of their intellectual structure much
deeper than it is for styles and history itself. The most creative projects revive
archetypes.

Galleries surround the conference halls perimeter, at the back of the
lantern’s facades and of its great metallic and glass structure. Access
corridors to interpretation booths follow the inner glass wall, shaping some
of the building’s most surprising spaces. Both peripheral corridors and
backstage of the levels where meetings and ceremonies take place, those
circular galleries are exposed to natural light in a second stage and they
give the necessary breathing space all round the closed main halls. Through
the silkscreen printing bands of the lantern’s setting, the view gives on to
the atrium the inner window patchwork faces. The curved line of the way
follows the sides of the lantern, its profile in gradually narrowing or widening
planes from one floor to another. The galleries provide meandering
space, indispensable to comfort and favourable to the imagination, to the
intellectual spontaneity of all occupiers and officers. How can aesthetical
suggestion and stimulation qualities be felt?

Curved lines create a vanishing perspective (when entering those
galleries, one cannot see their end), whereas the great glassy wall trapezia
reveal plunging sights on to the outside. The coil passageway or the circular
gallery are no architectural novelties; many examples of these exist in great
housing buildings, theatres or other facilities, even in some of Philippe
Samyn’s achievements (Boulanger building in Waterloo, Comptoir Forestier
in Marche-en-Famenne, single-family house in Manneriehof). But there
is more to this than a mere circulation room or a corridor. Because the
gallery coils round the heart of the building whilst creating visual and tactile
closeness to its glass envelope. Attention then focuses on that double
interior: a self-contained space, like a crypt, on the one hand, and the wide
and deep space of a nave seen from its gallery, on the other. The secrecy of
a chamber and attraction of a public space.