An architectural nightmare in which we may soon find ourselves lost
ecently I read W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, described as a novel but to my mind more a series of essays on architectural oddities and natural phenomena (such as moths) which happened to obsess the author. As such it is a work of strange and powerful virtuosity. The passage on the Palais de Justice in Brussels struck a chord in my memory. More than half a century ago, I read of a case which came before a Magistrates' court in Belgium. A man accused of assault claimed in his defence that the person he struck had abused him and, in particular, had accused him of being an architeck After legal argument and calling expert witnesses, the magistrate dismissed the case on the grounds that architecte was an abusive word of such resonance as to constitute a serious provocation, which might justifY a beating, 'though not a severe one'. In this case, he added, the force used had been 'moderate' and was thus commensurate with the insult.
When I drew this to the attention of my French friends, they laughed and said that it was further proof that Belgium is not a serious country. But one of them pointed out that architecture had long been a Fighting issue there, for deep historical and racial reasons, aggravated by fierce linguistic differences. On the one hand, the Flemish-speakers felt the pull towards the German Rhineland, while on the other French-speaking Walloons looked to Reims and Paris, not least for architectural models, and these conflicts continue. The great 14th-century cathedral of St Jean in Bois-leDuc is now known, for instance, as St Janskerk, s'Hertogenbosch. Styles of architecture tended to depend on who was running the place: Burgundy, the Habsburgs, the French or the Dutch. The Walloons went for stone, the Flemings for brick. When Bonaparte took over, he could not demolish all the brick buildings and replace them with stone, but he decreed that all house facades in Brussels had to be whitewashed. Moreover, the traditional stepped gables of the houses had to be replaced by corniced ones. When the Dutch took over in 1815, they destroyed 2,000 French-style oil streetlamps and introduced gas — one of many unpopular moves which led to the Wallooninspired revolution of 1830 and to the formation of an independent Belgium.
In order to assert itself, the new country sought to turn Brussels into a brash international capital. Old working-class quarters were flattened and huge modem structures built on the ruins. These often embodied French ideas, both Neo-Gothic and neoclassical. Joseph Poelaert (1817-79), who had spent a decade studying building in Paris, made himself an expert at manipulating those in charge of public projects. In 1852 he became Brussels' Inspector of Buildings, and four years later its chief municipal architect.
That put him in prime position to get the contract to design a new Palais de Justice. It was to be of colossal size, to centralise all law, Walloon or Flemish, in the new capital, according to the French-style Code Napoleon, and to be in the secular classical revival style to emphasise the break with antiquated Catholic notions of law. Poelaert insisted on being sole dictator of the project, which pew alarmingly as he proceeded. The original floor area of 20,0(X) square metres swelled to 27,000 square metres, and the cost from 3 million Belgian francs 1o50 million. Entire quarters of working-class houses were demolished to make way for the behemoth and little effort was made to compensate or rehouse the dispossessed. The building was and is stupendous and dominates the whole of Brussels, It is the nearest an architect has ever been allowed to realise in solid stone the fantastical visual ideas of Piranesi or the still more gigantic apocalyptic buildings of the painter John Martin. There are seemingly endless corridors leading nowhere. grandiose staircases which ascend to nothing, and vast rooms with no apparent purpose. The visual impact of colossal empty spaces is overwhelming, justice being flattened in the process, and law lost in the maze of perspectives. If Dickens had chosen to illustrate Bleak House with a set of law-courts designed specifically to embody the endless duration and complexity of Jarndyce Jamdyce. he could have done no better than to choose this monstrosity. But by 1883 when it was finished. Dickens was dead; so was Poelaert. He seems to have been moving towards mental instability as early as 1850, and his delusions of grandeur increased alarmingly until his flame guttered out in 1879. It was the poor who had lost their homes in order to make lawyers feel like kings in a Babylonian palace who first used architeete as an expletive.
We may eventually be more familiar with this Kafkaesque embodiment of impersonal, and unfeeling, law than is comfortable to contemplate. Heady with the strong wine of federal gigantism, intoxicated by the presence in their capital of both Nato and EC headquarters, the Belgians have been indulging in legal imperialism. They have passed a law giving their courts the right to try 'war crimes' committed in any
country by anyone, irrespective of nationality. All that is required is for some left-wing fanatic from anywhere to go before a radical Belgian political magistrate, of whom there are plenty, and delate (as in the days of the Spanish Inquisition) an individual, whether soldier or national leader — or for that matter civil servant transmitting orders or newspaper editor or proprietor construed as an accessory — for that person to be arrested if he sets foot on Belgian soil, or pursued through the machinery of Interpol. (The last, I should add, is very much a political organisation these days, to judge by its French-inspired decision, taken to annoy Britain, to award its prize to the notorious head of Mugabe's secret police.) Such a delated person, who may have done nothing more than antagonise someone in the course of his military or administrative duties, would then find himself lost in the immensity of Poelart's legal mausoleum. The case of Colonel Collins, whose reputation has been destroyed by a vengeful American junior whom he ticked off, is instructive from this point of view. Politicians still in office, like Tony Blair or Jack Straw, are unlikely to be arrested in Belgian territory — though there is no certainty of this — but they will be vulnerable once they become private citizens. Here again, the case of Henry Kissinger, who narrowly escaped trouble in France a year or so ago, is relevant. Behind this law is antiAmericanism, needless to say, but it is clearly aimed at the British, too. The Americans are angry-, and a motion has now been tabled in Congress which, if passed, would authorise the US President to use force to effect the release of any US citizen arrested under the new Belgian law.
But whatever the consequences of this particular piece of left-wing plotting, the Brussels lawcourts are sure to figure in the visual apparatus of the European superstate, as our own system of justice, which goes back not just to King Alfred's day in the 9th century but to the time of Ethelbert of Kent, a quarter-millennium earlier, is subsumed into EC law. This is happening much more quickly than most people realise, accelerated by our judges who see that the new system will not only increase their importance but will also enormously raise the sum total of litigation and thus the prosperity of their profession. The Brussels courts, too big for little Belgium, have just the right megalomaniac size and juggernaut crushing-power to serve as final legal sanctum of the bureaucratic empire which is going up under our noses. We may soon be lost in its echoing and heartless corridors.
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