Europe’s tower of Babel

The inauguration of the Council of the European Union’s Lex building last week marks the latest stage in a drawn-out process of regrouping the institution’s staff in three buildings near the Schuman roundabout in the EU district of Brussels.

The Lex property will house 1,200 Council staff including the 800 translators who are currently working in three buildings scattered across Brussels - Woluwe Heights near the Cora supermarket at the start of the E40 motorway, Espace Rolin at the intersection of Boulevard General Jacques and Chaussée de Wavre, and a site on Place Frère Orban. These three buildings will be vacated now that Lex is available.

Lex’s main purpose is to act as a linguistic nerve centre for the Council and its multitude of working groups of experts. The name was chosen following a survey of staff to reflect the site’s linguistic function. It has seven meeting rooms, two of which are fully equipped with spaces for 150 officials and 29 interpreting booths.

There are currently 23 official languages with the addition in January of Irish, Romanian and Bulgarian. But this number could rise to 29 if Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Turkey join.

Council’s jurist-linguists who ensure that translations into the official languages are legally correct, will also move into Lex in 2008.

The five other meeting rooms are available for other functions at present but can be equipped for working group sessions if needed. According to Johan Burgers, head of unit for the Council’s buildings policy, ministers could meet in Lex if there were an emergency at the Justus Lipsius.

The building will also house the Council’s archives and libraries as well as a 400-seat canteen which can feed 800 people per session.

In addition to the Council’s translators and jurist-lingusts, Lex will house secretaries, managers, information technology staff, librarians, messengers and security guards.

The construction of the building was not simple. The project manager, Lex 2000 building company, had to deal with the collapse of part of rue de la Loi as well as the discovery of 17th century building remains. Nevertheless the project was completed within the three-year deadline at a total cost to the Council of €262 million. The building itself cost €200m, plus €35m for the land and €27m in fees and other costs. Putting up the Lex building posed major ­construction difficulties as the site is bounded by streets on two different levels, with a difference of 15 metres in height ­between the Chaussée d’Etterbeek and the higher-up rue de la Loi.

The main pedestrian ­entrance to the building is on rue de la Loi, but since cars and trucks cannot stop on rue de la Loi, there is a pick-up/drop-off point and VIP entrance on the lower level of Chaussée d’Etterbeek.

In line with current urban transport policy which aims to encourage office workers to use public transport rather than private vehicles, there are only 200 parking spaces for the 1,200 occupants.

The property will be the first in Belgium with a reinforced façade, designed after the 9/11 attacks in the US, which, in the event of a bomb attack is supposed to prevent the glass exploding inwards and injuring the occupants.

Part of the Council’s brief was for high ecological performance and the building includes heat pump technologies and cogeneration for combined heat and power. Rainwater is recovered and used in the sanitation system while the lighting is controlled by an energy-saving presence detection system.

The building also has a state of the art sound insulation system to deal with the challenges of the building’s location between a busy inner city road, rue de la Loi, and a train station.

Marc Vankeirsbilck from Dexia Banque, co-owner of Lex 2000, the company which managed the project, said that because the tower building was very compact and did not occupy the entire site, the architects have been able to include public space around on Lex on the Chassée d’Etterbeek level including a garden and a water feature. There are two Japanese-style gardens inside the building on the ninth floor to give staff with offices on the inside natural light and a pleasant view. Two panoramic elevators on the outside of the building offer views of the surrounding area. Part of that panorama will be continuing building work.

The next stage of the Council’s plans is to refurbish the newest part of the Résidence Palace building, which lies between the Justus Lipsius building and the Lex building. It will then become the Council’s main office in 2013. At that point the Council’s military and crisis management staff will vacate 158 Avenue de Cortenberg and the ERM building, designed by Henri Maquet, the architect responsible for the Palais de Justice and the Royal Glasshouses at Laeken.

The Council has been a bit of a travelling circus since the 1970s when it occupied the Charlemagne building, which now houses the European Commission’s external relations, trade and enlargement directorates-general. The secretariat then moved across rue de la Loi to the Justus Lipsius building in 1994, six years after work started.

But the rapid succession of EU enlargements meant that the Justus Lipsius had to be extended, not least because the meeting rooms for ministers’ sessions were only designed for 12 member states and were equipped with only ten translation booths for the then nine official languages. The main meeting room was expanded to accommodate 210 people and 25 languages.

This year the Council covered the entrance to create an atrium with 600 places for journalists covering summit meetings.

The inauguration of the Council of the European Union’s Lex building last week marks the latest stage in a drawn-out process of regrouping the institution’s staff in three buildings near the Schuman roundabout in the EU district of Brussels.