The man who redesigned the iconic Schuman roundabout, at the heart of the European quarter, has delivered a scathing verdict on the final result.
“We ended up really with the square that nobody wanted,” said Francis De Wolf, the leading Belgian architect on the project, told Euractiv.
He blamed bickering politicians and petty Belgian bureaucracy for undermining the three-year project, which is close to being completed without the centrepiece of his design: a circular polished steel canopy with a green roof in the shape of the European Parliament’s hemicycle.
“It would have created a huge amount of shadow on the square to make [it] more habitable,” said De Wolf.
Instead, the result is a paved-over expanse of concrete, with minimal greenery, and nowhere to meet. The area has been largely pedestrianised compared to how it was before – but it’s unlikely to attract much footfall.
Left: the architects’ winning plan for the roundabout | Right: how it looks today Credit: Cobe, Brut, Eddy Wax/Euractiv
The roundabout is being mocked both in the Belgian press and by people who work in the EU quarter.
“I presume Europe is not happy cos they have an empty square in the middle of their institutions, no nice place to sit in their lunch breaks, the people of the neighbourhood cannot be happy because they don’t have a nice meeting place,” said De Wolf.
“It’s the worst outcome if this would be a permanent situation.”
He lamented that the media did not pick up the story sooner, saying it may have pushed politicians to make better decisions.
“Now it’s too late in a way,” he said. It’s very unrealistic to imagine the canopy can still be built, he said, as it would require extensive building work to attach the foundations to the tunnels beneath the roundabout. “You’d have to break open the whole square again.”
De Wolf is baffled about how the project turned out so badly. “I’m not a politician … and I find it difficult to really understand what happened behind the scenes.”
Belgian solutions
De Wolf’s firm Brut won an international competition for the project with Danish firm Cobe in 2017.
Construction began in late 2023 but after the June 2024 elections, which were followed by a failure to form a new regional government for 20 months, there was limited political appetite to set aside funding for the canopy part of the project.
In 2025, the outgoing Brussels government asked the EU institutions for more money, but was shot down by Bart De Wever, the Belgian prime minister, who dismissed the request as a plea that would humiliate the whole country. That essentially put an end to the prospect of finding new funding.
The project received €17.4 million from the EU’s Covid recovery fund, out of a total initial budget of around €30 million. But costs ballooned and the Brussels government said €12 million more was needed for further works, including the canopy.
Beliris, the public infrastructure organisation led by Belgium’s federal and regional governments that has been running the project, decided to complete the works without the canopy. De Wolf said it would only have cost around €5 million.
Even though a contractor was chosen through a lengthy tendering procedure, the building work for the canopy never started. De Wolf said the project then got caught up in the aftermath of the Brussels regional election in June 2024, when the budget was a stress point.
Beliris focused on getting the project finished, which should finally happen in September.
(bw, ow)
Source:
www.euractiv.com