"By now it is customary to engage the work of Rem Koolhaas in terms of its active alignment with processes of cultural transformation, its planned instabilities and flexible components - an architecture designed as a dynamic ingredient of perpetual social flux and reorganization."(Crary,ANY 9.15)
The project Euralille comprises mainly of three parts.
Its reason of being is the new railway station. It is a multi-level building mostly below grade which connects not only on the local level traffic systems such as car, bus, subway and pedestrians, but which is supposed to become the node point of the European high-speed train network. "Inspired by so much coming and going, Koolhaas has often described the project as having a "soft" address - located not in terms of geography, but of the distance in time away from other cities..."(Architectural Record 3/95, p.91).
Above the long horizontal form of the station six monumental towers are proposed which should house uses as a hotel or a bank administration.
The largest footprint on the area is made by the business and retail center. "It...symbolizes the ambitious emphasis the Euralille administration has placed on the commercial program of the project and Lille's new sense of identity as the crossroads of European commerce"(Parsons in ANY 9.22). Under a huge sailing roof a transient market place is organized. Five towers nestle in the structure with uses such as student accomodation, hotel and offices.
The third most important part of the ensemble is the Lille Grand Palais, which again unifies in a large oval shape and under one roof an exposition hall, a congress center and a concert hall. The three functions are horizontally aligned and can be connected: "Zenith is the only concert hall in the world with a 294,000-cubic-meter backstage; Congress is the world's only conference center with 30,000 square meters of available lobby space; and Expo is the only trade center with a 6,000-seat showroom"(ANY 9.39).
The masterplanner of the whole endemble and architect of the Congrexpo Rem Koolhaas is himself extensively described as "a true European citizen": commuting every day between London and Rotterdam, driving a Maserati, speaking 5 languages, projects all over the continent and invitations from all over the world.
"Will Euralille become mainly a facility for transients from outside Lille, or a vital urban forum for those who reside in and around Lille? Will it become, as Rem Koolhaas has described it, "a new center of gravity" for the region, or will it simply become a commercial ghetto?"(Parsons in ANY 9.23).
The questions has to be extended: Does the fascination for the project only come from its scandalous simplemindedness, from the person of the architect, or from the real embodiment of dreams and ideas of the contemporaries? And to which extend is such embodiment ideal before it switches to spineless obedience of forces.
"As most European cities move to shelter their historic centers, pushing the hypermarket, the congress center, and the rock concert venue out to suburban zones, Rem Koolhaas and his ...OMA, are bringing "big" architecture back into the city..."(Architectural Record 3/95, p91).
Euralille promotes itself as being of a different approach to architecture which argues very much with the emergence of a new time and new tasks. It could be seen as a product of many browsings through the agendas of possible new times, as the incorporation of many virtual forces of the society, of many blueprints of "solutions" around and of lots of values relating to the notion of "the future".
Euralille is the dream of a self-containing moon station, it matches with the popularity of the ridiculous "Biosphere"-experiments. But it also takes care of the success of the suburban shopping mall, and below grade it is 6,000 parking spaces and a whole transportation network which obey to the still increasing desire for mobility.
The Congrexpo "building" achieves an almost temporary character. It seems to be assembled of reusable pieces. Its uses can be mixed and joined. It expresses not the thread of instability but the promise of possible and fast change and adaptation. Certainly this language meets many of the processes which are to dominate today's society. In particular by the location of Center in the immediate neighborhood to the old center of Lille it matches with the widespread ambiguity of "modern" life, with the high-end workstation on the antique table.
One right way to deal with Euralille as an example might be to think about its translation into smaller sizes. Its Bigness does not mean shear dimension.
The contrasts of Euralille with Bill Mitchell's anticipation of future reassembly (in form of informational networks) again points out how difficult the task is to interpret simple seeming facts as the emerging informational age into architectural reality.
Other Chapters:
1 Venice I
2 Venice II
3 Venice III
4 Browsing
5 Blueprint
6 Construction
7 Bigness
9 Literature