EUROLILLE ii

The city of Lille in Northern France aims to develop into a business center rivaling London or Brussels. OMA, the office of Rem Koolhaas, has given form to this ambition in the Euralille master plan. It was a largescale and complex design assignment. Here at the NAI, The Euralille dossier - part of the OMA archive - has been inventoried and is now accessible.

World-famous Projects

Twenty years ago, OMA donated a number of project dossiers to the NAI. It was an exceptional acquisition, since it was the first time that work on this scale from a young, still practicing architectural firm was incorporated into the collection. The archive has been expanded twice since then, in 1988 and 1994. In 1994, the first foreign projects were acquired, including Euralille. OMA has since managed to complete more and more world-class projects outside the Netherlands. The OMA archive now contains forty-four projects, comprising thousands of sketches, drawings and models.

Strategic Location

In 1988, OMA was commissioned to design the master plan for Euralille, which involved the old Lille Flandres train station, as well as the planned Gare TGV Lille Europe station. Lille, an industrial city with a high unemployment rate, saw an opportunity to win a prominent spot on the map of the new Europe. Its strategic location at the junction of TGV lines connecting Paris, London and Brussels would make Lille the crossroads of Europe. The fast TGV links would bring the millions of people residing in these cities closer together and Lille would be the theoretical center of a new superagglomeration.

Extra Large

Lille's Municipal Council anticipated a huge demand for conference and congress halls, offices, hotels, shops and entertainment centers. These large-scale ambitions had to be expressed in the overall plan and in the architecture. Developing a new district of this size is an extremely complex undertaking. Koolhaas wrote in S, M, L, XL about the commission he gained: "The only reason we were not completely paralyzed was that we never believed the project would actually happen. So we approached it by saying: okay, we're shocked. We're surprised. So let's be hyper-shocked, and hypersurprised and take this as a pretext for a Freudian flight forward. This thing is so complicated that we are going to exacerbate the complication to reach incredible levels of complexity. Then, either the project won't happen, or we'll be fired."

Large-scale Elements

Euralille is made up of several elements: the Triangle des Gares, the TGV station, the Espace le Corbusier, a park and the Grand Palais (also known as Congrexpo). The Triangle des Gares, designed by Jean Nouvel, contains shops, offices, homes and a theater. The Gare TGV Lille Europe (by Jean-Marie Duthilleul, architect of the French railway company SNCF), consists of a station with two towers above it: the Tour Credit Lyonnais by Christian de Portzamparc and the Tour WTC by Claude Vasconi. The park is a design by Gilles Clément. Within the overall urban plan, OMA has been responsible for the design of the Grand Palais (1990-1994), a center for congresses, exhibitions and major concerts.