OF VOIDS, NETWORKS AND PLATFORMS: POST-WAR VISIONS FOR A EUROPEAN TRANSNATIONAL CITY: 1952-1958

Abstract

In 1952, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) invited applications from cities of member states to host the ECSC's institutions and its future organizations. A range of small and internationally unknown cities located in border areas submitted their candidacies. However, after a series of exasperating and endless debates, the ministers representing the ECSC's member states agreed to postpone the choice to a later date and to temporarily settle in the city of Luxembourg, while Strasbourg would host the European Parliament. Joined in 1957 by the European Economic Community and Euratom, the ECSC renewed its invitation in 1958, this time with the hope of establishing a permanent seat. Again several member state cities submitted applications ranging from elaborate packages including detailed urban schemes for the future European seat to tourist brochures published by the National Chamber of Commerce. From these applications, the image of a new urbanity emerged, in parallel to the existing city and inhabited by the newborn `European citizen'. During the same period, several architecture competitions expressed a similar interest in developing new urban and architectural models for a unified Europe, such as the 1954-55 Architecture competition for a European district near Saarbrücken, the 1956-57 Competition for the Place des Nations, Geneva, the 1957-58 Prix de Rome for a European Pantheon and the 1957-58 Hauptstadt Berlin architecture competition for the center of Berlin.

This dissertation studies a particular moment in post-war European history representing a crossroads in the relationship between urbanism and the nation-state. With the post-war crisis of the nation-state and at the same time a fast - changing European city, the discourse that developed around the question of a seat for the European Institutions raised a set of fundamental questions about the connection between cities and citizens at a European scale. A new notion of a transnational European city emerged and developed based on three essential political and spatial concepts: the void, the network and the platform. They will form the structure of a research project looking across a wide variety of materials from protocols of the European institutions to sketches by individual architects.