The European Parliament in Strasbourg is the official seat of the European Parliament. It is a noteworthy building from an architectural and urban point of view. It is less important from a political and institutional point of view, as we will see.
The French people, always ahead when it comes to architecture, understood the major significance that the building would have and thus they wanted to give major importance to the design.
In 1991 the project of the French studio “AS Architecture-Studio” won the international competition and in 1999 the building was finished.
Situated on the bank of the canal which runs trough the city, the building has three main parts. There is a cylindrical tower around an ellipsoidal light shaft where the offices are situated. It breaks the great triangular volume where there are the common area, the meeting spaces and the services. In there and peeping out a bit, there is the hemicycle. From the outside, it looks like a big egg with a semi-sphere shape.
In a symbolic way, the building expresses the idea of the European Union’s continuous growth. The cylinder with offices which develops in an ascendant and circular way, leaves the top terraced like an unfinished building, leaving the structure visible and giving the opportunity for a future modular enlargement. If usually a structure which has nothing to support could be something unnecessary, here you get a special feeling, you almost feel very emotional. Somehow the architecture talks to us about the intentions of Europe.
Unfortunately not everything is so beautiful and the reality is that it is not possible to make an enlargement in that part of the building because of the required space. It is not prepared for that. If there is a need for more space, they would have to find another way to do it. However the floor’s optimization would not be at its best.
If the European Parliament was a body, the hemicycle would be the heart. In this blue-coloured heart the architecture acquires a great personality.
The rest of the space is very interesting and is an eclectic hotchpotch of materials and forms. There are a lot of footbridges at different heights, cafeterias and bars carpeted with flowers, interminable passages of different material and colours, and all of that with the omnipresent backdrop of Strasbourg and its canals.
The numerous virtues of the building lose their sense when we know that the building operates at full capacity only during four days per month. This is when the MEPs (around 750), their assistants and the other civil servants travel from Brussels to Strasbourg for the plenary session. In this point, we could ask ourselves if it is necessary to come to Strasbourg when we take into account the high cost and all the logistics it involves.
We should think about sustainability. Is it sustainable to have a building that remains empty most of the time and consumes a lot of energy? We should think about solar panels, boilers etc.
Despite all this, I think that the Parliament in Strasbourg has chosen the correct emplacement, form, program hierarchy and, definitively, it is the correct image that European Union should give.
Written by Francisco Rebollo.
