A Trojan Horse for Private Investment: Groupe Structures and the Brussels World Trade Center, 1969-1983

In the 1960s Brussels became the capital of the European Community, host of the NATO and the seat of many international companies. By consequence the city transformed very rapidly from a rather provincial town into a small metropolis. The scale, suddenness and dramatic and long-lasting impact of the corresponding building boom is perhaps best epitomized by the so-called ‘Manhattan Plan’ for the area around the North Station. The brainchild of a tripartite between a powerful local politician (Paul Vanden Boeynants), a ruthless developer (Charly De Pauw) and the then largest architectural practice in the country (Groupe Structures), it aimed at realizing a state-of-the-art business district that would confirm Brussels in its international status.This talk focuses on the project for a World Trade Center that was supposed to form the economic flywheel and the physical heart of the new Manhattan Area. An overly ambitious project at the onset – comprising almost 1 million square meters of office space distributed over 8 towers of 100m high – it failed dramatically and became a national symbol (up till the present day) for everything that can go wrong when urban planning meets ruthless capitalism. Fifty years later however, the time has come to reassess the planning culture of that period by looking into its original intentions rather than its (indeed often catastrophic) outcome. In this lecture, we will therefore interrogate the rationale behind the WTC project, and ask why it became such a failure. As we state, one of the principal reasons may well be that none of the actors involved was truly interested in the project per se, but used it as a Trojan Horse in putting through other agendas and personal interests.

ISBN:978-9949-594-64-1

Publication year:2018