Europäisches Parlament – Erneuerung Paul-Henri-Spaak-Gebäude in Brüssel (BE)

To create this porous atmosphere, the project is composed with three main volumes assembled together in the middle of the Parliament composition. One of them is a sort of thin tower elegantly laying between the two wings of the SPINELLI building: it gives a beautiful signage facing the city and showing in a clear way this new phase of the parliament development. It is a way to bring this building into the Parliament ones, and also to bring it “to the city”. The two other volumes face the Park in a non-symmetrical way, which is interesting and full of potential: they show a contextual approach in the park where garden shapes and limits do not have any symmetry.

The possibility of walking between the volumes can also be perceived like a promenade inside the democracy, avoiding any excess of monumentality. With this porous composition, the project shows no barrier between city and park, and limit any impress of massiveness.

The inner composition is relatively clear, because each volume corresponds to a specific program; the biggest volume on the south includes the main chamber. On the top of it a smaller volume includes Committee rooms. The second one includes the public areas and culture facilities, while the third one facing the city centre includes the Trilogue areas, showing to the city an important component of the EU institution.

As a significant number of projects, this one also shows a porous way to welcome plants and garden inside the programs: the team will have to prove the feasibility of this objec-tive. In this project, these indoor gardens are distributed into specific spaces accompanying foyers and resting places at several levels, including a unique experience garden on the top of the small tower upon the Trilogue areas.

The interior of the main Chamber shows a very warm atmosphere, filled with a lot of tim-ber elements, with a long circular window allowing a generous daylight all over the day. It is a good decision as people will often stay the whole day in it: in this case, they will follow the sun course through the glasses.

In terms of daylight, this project is of course very satisfactory, as the human scale of each volume allows daylight everywhere, including meeting rooms. The shape of each volume is slightly concave to embrace views on the park and create a lot of interesting reflections of the trees inside the glazed facades. This character can introduce a very sensitive ap-pearance of all these crystalline facades, mixing them with trees and sky in a delicate way.

Overall, the jury judges the proposal as a bold, consistently developed contribution to the competition whose outstanding quality is the conceptually anchored interaction with the city with which the existing complex is supplemented with well-balanced new buildings that radiate innovative spirit and openness.