NowBrussels

Architecture

Architecture in Brussels

Brussels grew as a merchant town around a market square and then filled with the institutions of a continent, so its landmarks run from Gothic guild halls to the glass of the European Union. Art Nouveau is the thing it gave the world.

• Europa Building

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  Completed 2017

  Philippe Samyn

  The seat of the European Council, dropped inside the courtyard of a restored 1920s block near the Commission. Samyn hung a rounded glass lantern in the old court and clad it in three thousand seven hundred oak window frames salvaged from every member state, so the Union's most powerful room is wrapped in Europe's own reused timber. The lantern glows at night above the Art Deco shell. It is EU symbolism made literal, and better built than most buildings that try it.

• Atomium

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  Completed 1958

  André Waterkeyn · André and Jean Polak

  A pavilion for the 1958 world's fair, built as a single iron crystal magnified a hundred and sixty-five billion times. Waterkeyn, an engineer, set nine steel spheres at the corners and centre of a cube balanced on one point, joined by tubes carrying escalators and stairs, with the Polak brothers detailing the shells. It was meant to last six months and was never taken down. The optimism of the atomic age survives here as a building nobody could bring themselves to demolish.

• Hôtel Tassel

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  Completed 1893

  Victor Horta

  A townhouse near the Louise avenue, and the building usually named as the start of Art Nouveau. Horta ran an exposed iron column up through the centre of the plan and let its line spread into the ironwork, the mosaic floor and the mural of the stair hall, so structure and ornament became the same curling line. The plan is open and lit from above, unusual for a narrow city house. It was a private commission that changed how a generation drew.

• Palais de Justice

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  Completed 1883

  Joseph Poelaert

  The law courts on the hill above the Marolles, and at its completion the largest building put up anywhere in the nineteenth century. Poelaert piled Egyptian, Greek and Roman motifs into an eclectic mountain of stone crowned by a dome, on a footprint larger than Saint Peter's, and cleared a whole working-class quarter to build it. He died before it was finished and never saw the scale it reached. It is monstrous and unloved and impossible to ignore, which was more or less the point.

• Brussels Town Hall

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  Completed 1455

  Jan van Ruysbroeck

  The town hall on the Grand-Place, the tallest thing on the square at the centre of the city. Van Ruysbroeck raised a Gothic tower ninety-six metres over an off-centre facade, the two wings built decades apart and never meant to match, and topped it with a gilded Saint Michael. The guild houses that frame the square were rebuilt after a French bombardment levelled the market in 1695. It is the room the city has run itself from for six centuries, still the busiest square in Belgium.