![]() ![]() If architecture and design in Belgium ever get a mention, it is usually in the ‘another ugly home’ category. It is small and usually plays the role of facilitator. That is how we Belgians are.’ Belgian humility is rooted in the country’s complex history and culture. ![]() Ward Daenen, an editor at De Morgen, one of the country’s Flemish dailies, explained: ‘Do you know the Flemish expression, “happy with a dead sparrow”? It means being happy with nothing. The gloom, the rain, and the formality of the place really were overwhelming. In my youth, Brussels was a dark, rainy, unfriendly, unseductive, unappealing, charmless place. The new town hall for Deinze was designed by Tony Fretton. With its status as the permanent seat of the European Council and Commission, its own complicated system of overlapping governments that few people from outside ever try to come to terms with, Brussels seems to be the city Anglo- Americans love to hate. ![]() They also possessed ‘the ability not to take ourselves too seriously’. They were, he said, modest, open, creative, pragmatic and good at compromise. In 2010, King Albert II, in a speech at the Royal Palace, defined his people’s characteristics. Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme are all within a few miles of each other outside Brussels, where, today, NATO has its headquarters. A country famous for its beer, frites and chocolates, and an international reputation for its eyewatering system of taxation, Belgians may well be the world’s least patriotic people.įrom the 16th century until the Belgian revolution in 1830, Belgium, at that time called the ‘Southern Netherlands’, was the site of many battles between European powers, and dubbed ‘the cockpit of Europe’. There is far more to the place than the Ghent Altarpiece, Georges Simenon, Magritte, Audrey Hepburn, Tintin, and a handful of great football players. In Belgium you sense he got it right.Īh, those silly games: name ten famous Belgians. Unsurprisingly, in 1993, Umberto Eco said the language of Europe was translation. The country is an opaque mesh of decision-making channels with three autonomous regions, and three language communities, with separate parliaments and territorial boundaries of regions and language areas that are not identical. The story of European integration, from Messina to Maastricht via the Luxembourg village of Schengen, meets in Belgium. Belgium: what was once called ‘a small country with small horizons’ now sits at the heart of Europe. Stephen Hitchins takes a look.Ī PLACE TO change trains, a country to drive through quickly on the way to somewhere else a country at the heart of Europe with the scars of former battlefields and memorials scattered across Flanders. Mercilessly reviled as possessing the ugliest homes in the world, Belgium is now home to some of the most intriguing architectural gambits in Europe. ![]()
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