For the Capital City

gy Pier Vittorio Aureli

In bad times, we stiould become able to say: Bacic to tilings!

gfuno Latour, 2 0 0 4

To remain neutral is a bad attitude: you will be disdained by ttie winners and hated
the losers.
Micolo IVlachiavelli, 1 5 1 3

From the early collective struggle to establish a project for such a complex,
problematic and crucial city as Brussels, it was clear among us that the post-
modern architectural and urban planning mental habits concerning the city
and its representation were no longer an effective way to challenge Brussels'
current critical verisimilitude\ Within the framework of Brussels, Capital Roland Barthes defined
"critical verisimilitude" as that
of Europe, intended as a problem and as an urban paradigm, the current
which is not expressed in the
critical verisimilitude of this city - its current cultural evidence - is constituted declarations of principle and
that moves within "a certain
by its inexorable fragmentation, its irreducible political complexity, its
aesthetics ofthe public."

Introduction grandeur of vacancy, its resistance to the presence of institutions, and

by its fluctuating stasis of urban imagination. In our mind, to establish a
project in Brussels was to proactively challenge this critical status quo by
"Consisting in what appears
obvious," wrote Barthes, "the
verisimilar critique remains
detached from any method
in particular because, on the
disentangling the cultural and ideological complex constituted by Europe,
contrary, method is the act of
EU and the city of Brussels. The subject of this operation is urbanity itself, doubt with which we interrogate
seen in its phenomenological trace of our being within the city through the ourselves on events or on
nature...the verisimilar critic
immediate experience of its form. The principle of this project is nothing prefers evidence." From: Roland
more than a composition and transfiguration of fragments found, collected Barthes, Critica e Verity, Turin,
1969 (2002), pg.19 (author's
and chosen according to a vision that sees the source of a project about translation).
European representation in the forms of urbanity and in the composition of
its intelligible manifestation: architecture.

Brussels-Europe-EU
"Constitutionalism" vs "Functionalism'

Lately, in the media, there is a tendency to easily overlap the idea of Europe
with the reality of the European Union (not to mention the tragic gesture
to rhetorically overlap the idea of the European Union with the name of
its currency). In this situation, the idea of European Union is seen either
as an "orgasmic inevitability," in the words of Rem Koolhaas, or as a
political pathology of our post-national era. Missing in these scenarios is
the idea of the European Union as a project or vision; a theory born at a
very specific historical time in response to the dilemma of how to shape a
form of governance that would be simultaneously critical to the principle
of complete unanimity among its components and form a supranational

24 Brussels Capital of Europe I Introduction Forthe Capital City 25

entity based on tiie acl<nowledgment of the difference and specificity
among these components. This dilemma is embodied in the project of
Federalism, a project that, in turn, consciously or unconsciously, mirrors the
ancestral geopolitical pattern of Europe itself: a place in constant struggle,
if not crisis, between the necessary distinction of parts (think the Greek
Archipelago, and the reduction to one, think the Roman Empire). Within the
contemporary geopolitical scene, the conception of the European Union is
nothing more than a political conjecture that echoes this ancient dilemma.
This conjecture has been promoted by t w o different methodologies: the
so called Functionalist method of Jean Monnet - a step by step political
construction based mainly on ad-hoc economic policies - and the so called
Constitutionalist method inspired by Altiero Spinelli - the aspiration to a
Federal Union that puts the question of institutions, their form, task and
place as its primary "constituent fact." The silent history of the making of
the European Union evolved by implementing the real-politik of the first and
postponing the urgency of the second, resulting in a conspicuous economic
infrastructure whose image is ironically reminiscent of the hypertrophic
bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. However, unlike the latter, the EU project
seems wrapped in the cultural cliché of post-ideological political correctness.
Indeed, it can be argued that even the "style" through which European
institutions are placed and represented today in Brussels unconsciously
reveals this ideological laissez-faire, clearly manifested by the corporate
look of the EU office enclaves and lobby-space sprawl within the city
center. From the point of view of cultural and ideological affection, the EU
federalist project is too much a victim of its narcissism of good intentions,
a narcissism that covers a dramatic deficit of political imagination. Beyond
the assessment of generic forms of public governance, the European federal
project is undergoing a crisis of representation. The origin is embedded
within the lack of representation of its institutions as real spaces and
accessible forms in the realm of concrete singular experiences.
Challenging the contemporary disbelief in the effectiveness of
representation, institutions and, most of all, the capability of urban
conjectures to give form to these institutions, we chose the task of
addressing the question of Brussels as capital city as a gesture that in itself
expresses something that goes far beyond Brussels and the EU: something
that regards the idea of Europe today and its intelligibility in one place
beyond the institutional non-places of post-modern politics. In order to
make such a choice - that is not justifiable within the functionalist agenda
of the current EU politics- we endeavor to build up momentum in the form
of a project for the city; one that links the existing struggle of Brussels as
a city in its own terms to the constitutional aspirations of a supranational
entity clearly identifiable also as an institutional and real place. We don't
pretend to make any naive translation of political constitution into a
"political architecture;" we mean to emphasize the necessity of a proactive
engagement through the urban project. Instead of attempting to record all
possible complexities and contradictions within the city, a proactive attitude
26 Brussels Capital of Europe I Introduction
takes the risk to project a conjecture, not merely as a solution of a matter
of facts, but rather as a disputable and sharp object that involves people's
concerns.
After the Vacant City
The target is to build a specific analogue of the idea of Europe, politically
represented by the EU and, de facto, represented by the recognizable
characters of its urbanity that can match the real problems of a city that,
more than other cities in Europe, already represents the current European
situation. Indeed, Brussels' long history of separation, fragmentation,
speculative exploitation, resistance and multi-ethnicity can be seen as a
miniature of the European territory and its internal struggles. For this reason,
a project for Brussels can also be perceived as a European project; a project
which, instead of being just an abstract framework of policies or simply an
image, could finally point towards becoming a city in its original sense: a
center, the Capital.
The history of capital cities in Europe is not just a history of national
capitals, but also a history of cultural capitals. Cultural capitals can also
coincide with the centers of changing geopolitical entities, but by their own
institutional nature is able to merge the discontinuity of their political role
with the continuity of their cultural charisma. In order to perform such a
role, cultural capitals need an elaborate display of metropolitan emblems
that exceed what ordinary, everyday life is able to offer. A t the same time,
these metropolitan emblems should be defined and fine-tuned to the
problematic questions of the city. Paradoxically enough, in order to become
a convincing capital city, what Brussels lacks most in its center is precisely the
element of the "everyday" in its quintessential manifestation: housing. This
specific problem of Brussels is a providential question for such an ambition
to establish a constitutional project for the capital city of the 21^* Century,
because it forces one to rethink the role of representation of executive
powers no longer as autonomous hubs detached from the city, but as the
city itself where the institution is represented - even monumentally - but
through the real ingredients of a city This particular situation helped us
to refuse both the now-fashionable indifference towards the positioning
of institutions within the fabric of the city and the recent obsession
with security that promote the isolation and suburbanization of political
institutions. The aim of the project is to bring back "emblematic institutions"
such as political seats, housing sections, educational poles and infrastructural
hubs in close and orchestrated proximity with the center of the city. Within
this proposition, a first move of the project was the search for the dimension
ofthe center that would be neither the actual historic Pentagon nor the
Brussels Urban Region, but rather the still-unrecognized scale o f t h e city
that emerges by the selection and composition of the many vacant sites that
today characterize the civic fabric of Brussels. It might be charming and,
eventually, politically correct to romanticize the image of Brussels as "vacant
Forthe Capital City 27
city" or "terrain vague," liowever, tine project attempts to transform tiie
entropie nature of tlie vacant sites into urban artifacts: recognizable urban
parts that through the architectural scale are intelligible as new metropolitan
city-sections. To establish such an approach means to question and defy
one of the most popular formats of architectural contribution to the
contemporary city: the landmark.
Urban form and Representation: Beyond the Landmark
Both the urban artifact and the landmark share the property of being
conceived through the architectural scale. But if the landmark reduces
architecture to a monolithic shape that marks its representation only through
a skyline spectacle, the urban artifact is a concentrated section in which
representation is produced by the experience of the section itself. Unlike the
landmark, the urban artifact identifies itself with the attributes of the normal
city, and helps the city to avoid a frustrating open-ended juxtaposition of
individual accidents. Urban artifacts help the city establish the frame where
its emblems can occur in a manner that the city itself remains at the center
and not at the periphery of the frame. For this reason, urban artifacts
should aim to conquer and sustainably maintain the possibility for large
scale interventions within the city without useless utopian-megastructural
enthusiasm or gigantic gestures of architectural parlante. Urban artifacts
should provide conditional opportunities for development in order that this
impetus is not legible merely as an image-making opportunity but also as
a civic contribution to the real experience of the city In this respect, the
legibility of the capital city project is invested in the clear confrontation-
relationship between the institutions and the city. The project articulates
this confrontation in the very architectural questions of: how to enter a
building; what kind of form or space is proposed for the building; and how
that particular form or space provides the appropriate stage for the active
engagement with the institution.
It follows then, that the frame of Brussels as Capital of Europe - seen
as a constituent project parallel to the ongoing struggle of the EU and
analogous to the forms and archetypes of European urbanity - becomes the
passionate utterance through which we engage with Brussels' problems and
possibilities at once, in a single, defined project. A crucial decision was made
to give to an architectural resolution to the project in order to go beyond the
all-embracing rhetoric of diagrams and "network." On one hand, we believe
that the finite character of the project is the only guarantee of its productive
and open-ended future, unfolding in discussions and debates. On the
other, this choice was also taken as a general response toward the current
disciplinary disbelief in architecture and especially towards its main specific
manifestation: Form.
28 Brussels Capital ot Europe I Introduction
Form
f / j e Possibility of its occurring in states of affaire is the form of an object
Ludwig W i t g e n s t e i n , 'Tractatus L o g i c o - P h y l o s o p h i c u s ' , 1 9 2 2
In the last decades, the idea of form has been removed from the realms
of architecture and urbanism. Due to the massive changes that took place
vvithin the contemporary urban condition, the traditional tasks of these
disciplines (i.e. to give form to the city) were considered inadequate tools
vvith which to meet emerging pressures and seemingly insoluble new
complexities. As a result, sub-disciplinary fields of research and application
were promoted, such as programming, branding, mapping, marketing (and
research itself) and were thought to be successful and operative alternatives.
The instrumentality of form in the construction of the contemporary city
was not only seen as outdated, even more than the presumably ineffective
relevance of form, the idea itself of mal<ing the city became a moral non
sequitor. Since the city was conceived as evolving from uncontrollable and
unintelligible social and economic forces, architects were forced to consider
it as an unknown entity - a mere nature - representable only through
simulacra of reality-as-found and those of an ever-growing accumulation
of complexities and contradictions. These twin dynamic conditions were
deemed as the prerequisite (and the only) resources from which to learn.
Within this theoretical scenario where the city is seen as a boundless,
sprawling and self-organizing organism in a seemingly biological state of
flux that is devoid of any intelligible politicai intention or other objective
purpose, the culture of architecture seems to retreat into a fetishistic
celebration of its value as "shape" and "identity," or tends to fuse with
concepts and operative scales that are often no longer representable from
within its immanent material vocabulary We can assert therefore, that
between floating shapes and global flows it is difficult to find a theoretical
legitimization for our knowledge as architects^. On the other hand, the
The culture of the Sprawl has
city as an intelligible point of gravity for the human needs of sociality and defined two opposite scenarios:
representation - as center - the city as real, tangible and dense form is on one hand, the space-
endlessness of the new global-
ever-present and still constitutes a crucial demand of research for architects. regional dimension of the city,
Despite the sophistication developed by the dominant new network of and on the other, the Irreducible
itemization produced by the
global authority and governance - a sophistication based on trans-national attention to the domestic micro-
regimes of trade and mobility - researchers in the social sciences maintain dimension. One can see this
"Concordia oppositorum" in the
that the contemporary city cannot simply be considered as the accidental success of disciplines such as
field of economic forces, but still requires a specific form; a form that can Geography and Interior Design.
enhance its sustainability not only as a place to live but also as a means of
centrality - in the service of cultural and political representation.
Recent geopolitical events, as demonstrated by current studies on
urbanization, seem to be investing once again in the idea of centrality
as an indispensable form of social and cultural identification, a form
that cannot easily be replaced by any other organizing or infrastructural
system, political or economic framework - not even by the omnipresent
Forthe Capital City 29
scale of globalization and the correspondingly popular notion o f t h e city-
as-region. Notwithstanding that, and regardless of whether the pervasive
nature of the global economy can or cannot be avoided, we are entering a
cultural phase in which the exultant optimism toward the mythologies of
globalism, genericity and the free-market as the end of city-history is rapidly
dwindling. Within this vacuum of paradigms, a vacuum that at the moment
is dominated by misplaced "political wanderings" and a fear of proposing
new models, the city must be rediscovered as a strongly identifiable place, a
crucial laboratory of urban consciousness and, above all, as a constructible
and intelligible physical form.
Even the influential culture of urban geography, that had until recently
overlooked the threat of a post-metropolitan landscape, seems to be slowly
moving away from the rhetoric of globalization and regionalization in their
most radical form. A rhetoric that is purely concerned with the immateriality
of global flows and the smoothness of networks as the main vectors of
urbanization is giving way to speculations about the splintering forces of our
contemporary urban world which, albeit indirectly, highlight the strategic
relevance and the specificity of the city as central urban artifact with ever
growing explicitness. An artifact intended as the available representation of
the city itself and as the tangible and immediate phenomenological ground
by way of which the urban condition perseveres. Within this scenario, the
theory and practice of urban design - the combination of architecture
and urbanism as a composite discipline that is concerned directly with the
form of the city - can acquire a new relevance both in its effective material
organization and as the pertinent scale of speculation about an alternative
idea of the city.
Urban Design, or the Problem of Dimension
In general, the studio has concentrated on the idea of the city as the
form of cultural and political centrality and maintained that its urban
architectural features are the main contribution to its manifestation; this
means that the knowledge accumulated is within the province of urban
design. Urban design is the field within our discipline that currently reflects
the highest level of crisis, while simultaneously showing signs of unrealized
potential. Formally established in 1956 at Harvard University as a reaction to
technocratic planning and sprawl, the term "Urban Design" was coined by
Jose Lluis Sert and marked the formation of a new disciplinary field engaged
in the process of defining the form and the spatial quality of the city. While
we may need to adopt different attitudes today, between the fifties and the
seventies the field of urban design was the arena for the confrontation of
conflicting ideologies over the idea of the city, from the last CIAM meetings
to Team X, from the Tendenza to Metabolism, from Radical Design to OMA's
rediscovery of the Metropolis. Despite its more radical beginnings, today
the practice of urban design has been largely relegated to commercial or
anachronistic approaches. Invariably these are based on prescriptive design
30 Brussels Capital of Europe I Introduction
guidelines reflected in the USA by the conservative agenda of the Congress
forthe New Urbanism: traditionalist practices that fail to progressively
address the contemporary condition of the urban territory.
The question that the studio raises is whether it is possible to reconstruct a
contemporary agenda for "Urban Design" as a productive and advanced
discipline, one that can clearly and intelligibly represent in form our cultural
and political realities. This means that we have to define a specific and
tangible field of operation in which architecture can be more than a form
of urban décor, floating upon the multiplicity of forces that are shaping the
contemporary metropolis.
This question in turn raises the issue of dimension for the urban project.
Dimension is directly and proportionately related to the measure of relevance
ofthe design intervention; it determines the degree to which this can act
upon its context, to which extent it can be a factor of change within the
city. It is the concrete (and critically localized) instrument in a situation
where it is clear that the scale of design cannot include the entirety of the
urbanized territory. The intervention's relevance is not measured by means of
its "Bigness" alone^. The term dimension is not intended only as a physical We can affirm that Rem
measurement and thus does not indicate scale relations. The term instead Koolhaas' Bigness, Aldo Rossi's
Urban Fact, Robert Venturi's
regards the syntactical application of a concrete and active knowledge, Strip, Kenneth Frampton's
ofthe potential, limits and instrumentality inherent in the economy of Megaform and Oswald Mathias
Lingers' Grossform are
architectural thinking; the specific range within the powerful economy that
concept-related to the problem
lies in the reformative relationship between the abstraction of an idea and ofthe design intervention
and its dimension (literal and
the concreteness of the discipline itself as material organization - between
phenomenological) within the
the theoretical position and its physical materialization; in other words, condition ofthe contemporary
city. In spite of their different
the exercise of the discipline's knowledge. A problem has an architectural positions, these notions share
dimension when it is understandable and workable strictly with the means the awareness of urban design
as the prime contributor to the
and tools of our vocabulary as architects. form of the city
Dimension can be interpreted as both a concrete category of urban design
and as a measure of conceptual economy, a necessary parameter for the
architectural evaluation of the city If the concept of dimension is not
an abstract notion, but places its origin in a nexus of concrete facts, it
follows that the urban project must be a crucible within which its original
datum - the form of the city - is borne out. Meanwhile, the awareness of
dimension for the urban intervention is not limited to technical questions.
Starting from within the discipline itself (the immanence of the urban
project) it inevitably questions society, politics and power on the level of their
Here Is the idea of the project's
material organization, while at the same time being at the service of these
concreteness as its "logical
practices - a crucial paradox to be understood critically. Ultimately, the idea construction," since research
and design theory are today
of dimension implies a commitment to the project as an instrument of formal
victims of an intolerable misuse
and material responsibility, meaning a departure - and a move forward - from of narrative and metaphors.
Instead of investing In the
the laisser-faire rhetoric of flexibility, indeterminacy, narrative, programming,
unreliable and often demagogic
content, hybridity and immateriality'*. abstraction of the "Mise en
scene," the urban project
must rediscover its material
immanence if It Is to constitute
itself as the real and tangible
"metaphor of change."
Forthe Capital City 31
Dimension of Capital Cities
During tlie general process of economic restructuring in the 1970s and 80s
and the full affirmation of the global market in the 90s, national sovereignty
fell into crisis. This process emphasized the role of what Saskia Sassen calls
new "World Cities" and questioned the relevance of capital cities as both real
centers and geopolitical symbolic form. More recently, however, the problematic
scale of political complexity implied in new geographical frames such as regions
and trans-national cooperation, has created a cultural condition in which the
meaning of "strongly identified places" is again critical and urgent. Within this
context the idea of centrality is becoming more and more important, not only
as a gravitational point for the economic system, but also as an institutional and
symbolic fulcrum in the apparent space-endlessness of the contemporary city.
The recent debates about Brussels as Capital of Europe have dramatically
highlighted the relevance of city-form as an urgent question within our
globalized world, while at the same time it has revealed the tragic incompetence
of architects and planners to provide a technically pertinent response to this
question. Within this framework, the future of Brussels seems to be one of
the most urgent questions to be answered. The scale of the city is modest if
compared with other metropolitan centers in the world, but its geopolitical
relevance makes it one o f t h e most significant. Brussels is simultaneously a
state itself, part of the Flemish Diamond (the most densely urbanized region
in the world together with the Randstad and the Ruhrgebit), the Capital of
Belgium, one of the Cities that define the Central Capital City Area (together
with Amsterdam and Cologne) and, above all, the Capital of Europe. Its role as
capital simultaneously defines Brussels on a global scale and at the scale of its
form. This seems to particularly address the dramatic incongruence between
the future role of the city, its political intelligence, and its consistency as a
representational form. Brussels is in dramatic need of a new vision that can
overcome the outrageous mediocrity of its recent European urban development
and at the same time resolve the imminent expectation of Brussels to perform
as the permanent site for the idea of the European Union to be shown, at once
and in one place.
Representation
How to give form to all of this? How to re-present this form within the
necessarily reductive nature of an architectural project and, above all, how to
construct a form of representation that is a-iconic and yet fully expressive in its
own abstract terms?
To answer this question, the studio has chosen to investigate the nature
of urban artifacts as limited form-objects that, before being images, are
formal and spatial experiences expressed in terms of the composition and
configuration of form. The re-presentation of this experience is directly
expressed in the artifact itself, in its compositional nature which is not
32 Brussels Capital of Europe I Introduction
determined by any matter of fact aigorithmically extruded from the
research, but deliberately based on the research's matter of concerns.
These matters of concerns are related to our selective interpretation of
European urbanity as a thing in itself and as a phenomenological analogue
of united discreteness that the idea of Federalism entails. Beyond a political
scenario, this is an idea of an entity as an object in itself and yet bound as
part of an intelligible whole. Therefore, the language of the project refers
to this idea not through an iconographic mimesis, but through a common,
passionate utterance of its features in the form of elements, including the
infrastructural organization of the new centrality, the reasoned disposition
of the projects across this centrality, the definition of the priorities of
programs that by their orchestrated location are able to enact a sense
to the metropolitan experience (knowledge, housing), the configuration
ofthe buildings themselves according to the recognition of common
urban principles (flatness, low rise density, architectural monuments as
frames rather than as totems). Then what kind of communication can this
architecture perform? How can a radically abstract architecture manifest
itself as a passionate utterance of a series of choices that do not pretend to
be spectacular, but that aspire to activate a certain consciousness, certain
cognition of how things are composed together? Perhaps the best answer
to this question - an answer that emerged from the way we have attempted
to express our proactivity towards the idea and the necessity of European
Union momentum through the means of urban form and architecture - is
the analogy that art-historian Michael Fried^ has argued in order to explain
Miciiael Fried, ,4rta/7d
the kind of expressivity of abstract sculpture: Objectliood: Essays and
Reviews, The University of
Chicago Press, Chigago, 1998
"/ want to suggest that our situation is roughly analogous to that
of a small child almost on the verge of speech, in the company of
adults conversing among themselves. It is often dear enough, in such
circumstances that the child grasps something of what is going on
around it Here the question arises: to what extent the child responds,
if he Is still ignorant of the meaning of the individual words? And the
answer must be, to the abstract, configurations in time made by the
spoken words as they are joined to one another, and to the gestures,
both of voice and body that accompany or better still inhabit them.
To the child the language he hears spoken around him is both abstract
and gestural: here is the crux and the high-water mark of our analogy
Whatever eloquence, whatever capacity to move or to excite him, or
merely to command his attention, the language may posses resides
solely in its character as configuration and composition."
Forthe Capital City 33