Euroquarter revamp

Choosing the winning design

The selection of the design was not the outcome of an orthodox architectural competition. Instead, an advisory committee was convened, with six experts nominated by the EU member states, two nominees of the Brussels regional government, two nominees from the Brussels commune and two from the European Commission (Alain Scribain, a director for administration, and Gabor Zupko of the Office for Infrastructure and Logistics in Brussels).
They advised the regional government on five designs short-listed last year from 35 applicants.

The regional government chose a design by a French-Belgian-British team of architects and engineers: Christian de Portzamparc, architect of l'Opéra Bastille in Paris and the LVMH tower in New York; Wirtz International, a Belgian team of landscape architects; Coteba Belgium, an engineering and project management firm; and the UK-based architecture and engineering firm Ove Arup.

The runners-up were:

• The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, famed as the architectural practice founded by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, conceived of the rue de la Loi as a triumphal avenue with a series of classical buildings.
• The Belgian practice of Xaveer de Geyter put forward a design which envisaged most of the desired office space in towers just north of the chaussée d'Etterbeek.
• JDS Architects, with offices in Denmark and Belgium, proposed a series of towers spread along the length of rue de la Loi.
• The design of Fletcher Priest Architects (FPA), a London-based firm with offices in Riga and Cologne, emphasised the streets that cross rue de la Loi, and how they would be integrated into the plan.
• The FPA design and the winning design were the only ones on the shortlist that did not want to put the traffic in a tunnel between the bridge over the chaussee d'Etterbeek and the inner ring-road. The regional government's estimate was that creating a tunnel would cost €20 million.