‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning

Abstract

In a living state organism, people are always trying to reinterpret political symbolism. Wolfgang Braunfels, Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900–1900 (1988), 321. Introduction It has been argued in previous chapters that states’ strategies to foster belonging among their citizens have led to the built environment being mobilized in a variety of ways in differing political contexts. The focus of this chapter is on two distinct but related developments in contemporary Europe: first, the European Union's attempts to embed their political project in cultural forms from architecture and the built environment (discussed with reference to the Brussels Capital of Europe project), and second, coexistent projects in member nation states to reposition and ‘Europeanize’ existing national architectural symbols (illustrated with reference to Norman Foster's reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin). An overarching concern of the chapter is to develop an understanding of the role of architects in the cultural construction of what can broadly be understood as ‘transnational’ European political projects. As such, the focal point is not so much the emergence or otherwise of a distinctly European style of architecture, but rather the extent to which the ongoing work of high-profile architects to embed the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) of Europe into socially meaningful forms reveals something about the wider politics of architecture in the contemporary European context. After a brief contextualization of EU cultural politics, the first substantive discussion in the chapter addresses the EU's Brussels, Capital of Europe project, which drew together a number of high-profile European cultural commentators – including the leading architects Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel – to suggest a range of interventions both in Brussels’ built environment and in the EU's ‘branding’ more generally in order better to reflect the institution's ‘European’ values. The spatial and architectural projects that emerged from the project meetings and the subsequently published report (European Commission 2001) are explicit engagements with the cultural form that political Europeanization, a highly contested project in search of democratic legitimacy and popular support, should take. As a result, the Brussels Capital of Europe project reveals a number of the tensions associated with both the political mobilization of architects and, more broadly, the ambiguous relationship between architectural form and social meaning.