The EU's architecture is partly to blame for Brexit

Imagine Westminster Palace or the Washington Capitol replaced by the buildings housing the European Parliament in Brussels, Luxembourg or Strasbourg. The latter are so insignificant that hardly a voter can form an image of the structures that represent the continent’s prime political institution. In the Brexit referendum voters had to ponder over leaving or staying in a faceless, scale-less and characterless abstraction.

Yet much worse was/is planned to represent Europe. The European Parliament project commissioned from Roger Taillibert in 1977 to secure Luxembourg’s European capital status was cancelled only because of massive popular protest. The steeply leaning tower became derided appropriately as “prick” cum testicles. The ponderous symbol, cantilevering 95m at 160m altitude, was to be held in balance by the parliamentary chambers, cantilevering 90m in the opposite direction, 40m up in the air.

European Community buildings without exception stand out by their massive size, their lack of appropriate symbolic quality and not least by the regular reports of shoddy construction, stability and maintenance problems.

Widespread disgust with European institutions, sprawling buildings and nomenclature is justified. Criticisms of an overpaid bureaucratic octopus, occupied with regulating inessentials, are correct. Those built colossi are repulsive demonstrations of a sterile creed: the denial of human scale, of traditional European urbanism and architecture, of its technical and artistic disciplines. The mistakes that disgrace the classical architecture illustrations of the Euro banknotes are a pathetic reminder of the reigning architectural illiteracy. The top-value 500 Euro note is hence adorned with a curtain-wall bouquet.

The tenets of the reigning ideology are based on the erroneous belief that, in an advanced industrial civilisation, all aspects of life must be dictated by industrial thinking, materials and processes.

The bloated organisations of the EU, whose parasitic nature is evidenced by its sinister “palaces”, are blinding many Europeans to the existential necessity of the union itself.

The UK and with it Europe are on the brink of dissolution and there is no plan B. The young generations ignore that the bloody battleground that was Europe has become a haven for peace and security by virtue of the EEC and the EU.

The idea of European union needs to be reborn, based on reduced and powerfully symbolic institutions and a common defence force, not doubling national institutions, nor replacing them, but securing the fundamental values of its democratic societies and cultures.

For that purpose I suggest that a small European capital city is founded to reassemble the exploding regional and national atoms under a beautiful banner. In physical form, in substance and aesthetic appearance it has to become the exemplum for the reconstruction of the European cities, communities and cultures.

I propose Eupolis to rise on an island, between France and Germany, bounded by the Rhine River and Rhine Canal to be designated extra-territorial. It is serviced by an ex-Nato airfield and two important motorways and by Europe’s prime river. The nearby oldest French nuclear power plant, Fessenheim, has to be decommissioned. Its 40-year existence has kept the area free of suburban sprawl.

If continental leaders understand the voters’ message that a new reformed EU demands to be created, with a minimal bureaucracy and timetable, based on a slimline constitution, the initiative of a small new capital of Europe will succeed.