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| Ghosts of Beijing lurk in Brussels |
| PALLAVI AIYAR / Dec 04, 2009, 00:11 IST |
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For six years I had lived in Beijing, the constantly churning capital of a dynamic country on the ascent. But I was now to move again, this time to Brussels, the bureaucratic centre of old world Europe. There were many counts on which this was a change I wasn’t looking forward to. But the one positive I did anticipate was an escape from the paroxysm of construction that was emblematic of Beijing’s remorseless embrace of modernity.
My life in Beijing had been lived out to an aural backdrop of jack-hammering. Unsurprisingly given that by some estimates, half the world’s production of concrete and one-third of its steel output were being consumed by the mainland’s insatiable appetite for building.
Moreover, having spent most of my China life in the capital city’s surviving hutongs — the narrow alleyways of the imperial city that had all but been demolished by greedy property developers — I was also looking forward to a metropolis with an architectural memory.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived at Schuman, the headquarters of the European Union and a 10-minute drive from downtown Brussels, to scenes right out of the rubble of Beijing’s incessantly re-wrought cityscape.
Box-like structures of glass and chrome glinted dully through the fog of dust flying about the carcasses of half-demolished older buildings. Bulldozers blocked traffic and passers-by had to resort to mime to communicate over the cacophony of construction clatter.
This piece of Beijing in the heart of Brussels was the home of the thousands of European Union bureaucrats that run the 27-member bloc’s affairs. The centrepiece was an orange coloured fortress-like hulk of a building called the Berlaymont which I was later to find out was more often referred to as the Berlaymonster.
Built in the 1960s, the “Berlaymonster” was constructed upon the ashes of the Dames de Berlaymont, a 300-year-old convent. The surrounding area, once a pleasant residential neighbourhood dating back to the 19th century and teeming with neighbourhood stores, churches and parks was also laid waste to make way for other lacklustre EU institution buildings.
What had happened in this part of Brussels was in fact exactly what was happening across China today: the wanton destruction of heritage in the service of the desire of an arguably mistaken concept of modernity.
During my years in Beijing, it was always Europeans who were the first to censure China’s alleged insensitivity to historical preservation. Varyingly attributed to ignorance, hubris or even a deliberate attempt by the ruling Communist Party to obliterate its own unsavoury past, Europe was held up by these critics as the example of the road that developing countries ought to follow when modernising.
And this was an argument that I had bought into until first-hand exposure to Brussels — a city both metaphorically and geographically at the heart of Europe — brought me face-to-face with a very different reality to that purported by China’s European censors.
Over the next few months I was to spend considerable amounts of time eliciting reactions to my observations. The local Bruxelloise were quick to point fingers at the European Union as the chief offending culprit. EU officials in their turn pointed the finger right back at the local population.
Wanton destruction of heritage was not a European thing they said as much as a peculiarly Belgian phenomenon.
Research revealed that there was some truth to the EU charge. Brussels had in fact destroyed so much of its older architecture that the term “La Bruxellisation” had come to mean the indiscriminate bulldozing of the historic city; the result of an unholy nexus between corrupt government officials and rapacious developers.
In the aftermath of the Second World War the city planners strove to transform Brussels into an international, modern metropolis, not very different from the more recent Olympics-inspired, corruption-tinged attempt in Beijing.
The result was an underground railway that cut a gash through the old city-centre, a maze of flyovers and tunnels and massive demolitions of populated neighbourhoods. In the melee many architectural gems like the Art Nouveau specialist Victor Horta’s Maison du Peuple and Hôtel Aubecq were razed to the ground.
The rising popularity in recent years of a “reconstruction” architectural ideology is now seeing an attempt to reverse this trend and de-modernise Brussels by destroying high-rises in the downtown area. Even the European Union has hired celebrity French architect and urban planner Christian de Portzamparc to undo some of its urban sins and devise a 15-year plan to integrate the EU buildings with the rest of the city in a more organic fashion.
But standing in a dilapidated warehouse amidst the debris of decades worth of Art Nouveau bric-a-brac, Diane Rosenberg remains sceptical of any real change of heart in the city’s attitude.
Diane is the daughter of Max Rosenberg, a used car dealer who quit his job in the 1970s to go into the demolition business. Those were days when entrepreneurs with wrecking balls had free rein to destroy any townhouse or public building put up for sale. But Max ended up spending less time demolishing than salvaging what he could from the bulldozed sites.
More than 10 years after his death, Diane has decided to put up his collection of over 1,400 pieces of assorted mouldings, columns, stained glass pieces, and balusters for sale.
Despite a fair bit of publicity there have been few takers for the pieces. Diane wanders around the assortment of wreckage wistfully; her father’s legacy largely unwanted by the city he saved it from.
But although Ms Rosenberg’s warehouse remains empty, there are other venues in Brussels thronged by crowds of shoppers. In ferreting these out I am once again led to the inescapable conclusion that despite protests to the contrary, Beijing and Brussels are indeed soul mates. What really seems to unite the heart of old Europe and that of rising Asia is a passion for Ikea.
Pallavi Aiyar, the Brussels correspondent of Business Standard, recently moved to Europe after more than six years in China
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