Not everyone who reads this blog will be particularly keen to know what the new EUropean Parliament building in Brussels looks like. But if you would like to know about this, I have a posting up at my Culture Blog which starts with a huge aerial photo of the place taken by someone else, and then has twenty four thumbnail photos you can click on to get to bigger photos that I took myself of this vast building when I was myself in Brussels not long ago.
It has taken me more than two months to get around to exhibiting these photos, for which apologies, but I presumably things have not changed that much since I took them. Partly this was because until recently I had much to learn about how to do this – “thumbnails” etc. (merci Monsieur) – and partly it was that, even if you do know how to stick up a mass of these thumbnails, it is still (for me anyway) a very unwieldy process to actually do, and to actually arrange them in a semi-coherent order, especially since this was the first blog posting effort along these lines that I have attempted.
The building is a scarily impressive edifice, or rather, agglomeration of edifices. I really missed not having a wide angle lens. As it was, it was like trying to photograph an elephant in a crowd. All I could do was assemble lots of details (hence the need for lots of pictures), with only occasional views that got the bigger picture, and none of the whole thing.
Which is only appropriate, considering that this is the EU, and that this entire building is itself only a relatively minor part of the big EU picture, which is itself utterly impossible to get in one snap.
That big starting capacitor strapped to the roof seems somehow appropriate.
It’s horrifying.
Ugly, bland, horrible buildings. So many institutional hq’s recently have been; the new Scottish Executive building in Edinburgh looks like a shopping mall; a bad one at that!
I’m continually astonished that architects that design crap like that that get a second commission, much less get to have a career.
Fred you are missing the point that Brian was making, viz – this is intentionally intrusive and forbidding, out of scale and aggressively ugly because … they can do it and there’s nothing the citizens of the EU can do about it. Brian’s point, if I am reading him right is, this is to teach us who is the boss.
“Here is what we can do with the tax money you sacrifice to pay.”
You might be interested in ‘Stitching’ software. You can take a series of digital photos from one spot, then use these programs to ‘stitch’ them together into one panoramic image.
I got one program about a year ago and have not had anything to use it on since then. This building seems like a good candidate.