L’architecture du quartier européen à Strasbourg depuis 1949 : enjeux locaux d’un développement institutionnel supranational

• Published in: In situ (Paris) Vol. 38
• Main Author: Gauthier Bolle
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication 01.02.2019
• Subjects: Alsace; architecture of the second half of the twentieth century; building; Council of Europe; modern architecture; public architecture
• DOI: 10.4000/insitu.20202

Since the installation of the Council of Europe headquarters in Strasbourg seventy years ago, the European quarter has grown gradually from a tiny graft made onto the Orangery Park, in the northern part of the city, in a residual area of Strasbourg’s late nineteenth-century urban organisation. With its strong municipalist traditions, the city has subsequently taken advantage of some of the key milestones of Europe's institutional development as opportunities to confirm the quarter’s vocation, but these local authorities were unable fully to anticipate the quarter’s growth. The heterogeneous character of the neighbourhood is a reflection of a process of trial and error. Building methods and design approaches have evolved significantly over time, highlighting at each stage the need to create powerful symbols. Dozens of architects with local, national and even international reputations have offered a wide variety of architectural propositions inserted into a crowded environment, but one which is given a certain peacefulness by the presence of water and vegetation. These successive initiatives in the service of forms of transnational democracy which are regularly called onto question today throw light on processes of hybridisation between academism and modernity and the symbolic potential of institutional architecture.