RDL / Masterplan of the European District

The European Union and Brussels

The European Union’s motto is ‘United in diversity’.
There is a clear maturity that understands the complexities and maybe incapacities of creating a singular union. The European project is in movement and embraces its differences of components and actors, currents and to become. By essence it outlines a body that is undefined in shape, size and taste. There has been sufficient writings made on the definition of the European machine to avoid another attempt. We will extract a few aspects that seem sufficiently recurrent to hold relevance in our quest for a European project as such:
-the Union grows. In 50 years more than 20 countries have been added to the 6 founders.
-the Union hasn’t profiled itself with architecture unlike other institutions tend to do.
-the EU is located in Brussels and aims at solidifying its presence in the Belgian capital.
-the Union is in the making
The European Union superimposes itself to the space of the City. In our project the European Union is, symbolically and spatially, a vast shared cape: under it the flows of the city are self-governing.