Euralille: the instant city.

Euralille, a new piece of city grafted on the edge of Lille, continues to grow at a frantic pace, creating a new economy for the region. Martin K. Meade appraises the development to date.

Built in barely 18 months to designs by Rem Koolhaas and OMA, Lille Grand Palais is 52[m.sup.2] of international exhibition and conference facilities plus a Zenith rock auditorium for 5000-6000 spectators, all rolled with deceptively simple elan into one vast low-slung ovoid container. The building was inaugurated on 3 June 1994 by Pierre Mauroy, Mayor of Lille and sometime socialist prime minister of France.

The Lille Grand Palais is a key component in the ambitious Euralille urban development project (AR September 1993), a virtually instant chunk of city and parkland at the heart of the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing-Villeneuve d'Ascq conurbation adjoining the Belgian border, for which Koolhaas was appointed masterplanner and chief architect in 1988. The project originated with the 1986 Franco-British agreement to build the Channel Tunnel, which was concluded, significantly, in Lille town hall where, in his capacity as Mayor, Pierre Mauroy received President Mitterrand and Mrs Thatcher, the then British prime minister, for the official signing. The Euralille project evolved from the subsequent decision taken in 1987 by France, Belgium, Holland and Germany to develop jointly the North European Train a Grande Vitesse [TGV] network.

As initially planned, the Paris-Brussels TGV line would have bypassed Lille, with a junction station serving the Channel Tunnel on the western outskirts of the conurbation. But local and regional authorities considered an inner-city TGV station would stimulate the regeneration of the old industrial and economic capital of French Flanders. Moreover, an ideal site already existed. Flanking Lille's 1865-84 central railway terminus, itself close to the historic core of the old town and the Grande Place, was a stretch of largely unbuilt land in military ownership -- the overgrown remains of the old fortifications, of which 70ha could readily be made available.

Under Pierre Mauroy's leadership, concerted lobbying by a powerful combination of local and regional interests representing the 1.6 million inhabitants of the cross-border Eurometropolis comprising Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing-Villeneuve d'Ascq and neighbouring communes in Belgium, secured in 1987 the desired location of the TGV interchange station in central Lille, adjacent to the existing Lille rail terminus. The latter, with nearly 15 million passengers a year, is second in national importance only to the Paris railway termini. It was already linked to the conurbation's tram and bus services and due to be integrated with the new automatic metro system. With the opening of the new Lille-Europe TGV interchange, rail passenger traffic in Lille is expected to be more than doubled.

For Pierre Mauroy, his collaborators and advisers, the successful bid for the Euro-TGV was an essential prerequisite for a new city district envisaged as the future development turbine that would reverse decades of industrial and economic decline in the region as a whole and revive Lille's traditional role in Flanders as a European centre of exchange and communication.

To this end, the development research company Euralille-Metropole was set up in 1988 under the chairmanship of Jean Deflassieux, president of the International Exchange Bank, with the public sector urban development specialist Jean-Paul Baietto as director. Having negotiated financial backing, Euralille-Metropole drew up a brief for an urban project intended to achieve the economic, social, urban, architectural and cultural punch required by Mauroy and, following a series of interviews, drew up a short-list of eight European architect-planners: Norman Foster, Vittorio Gregotti, Rem Koolhaas, Yves Lion, Michel Macary, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Claude Vasconi and Jean-Paul Viguier.

Koolhaas was appointed on the recommendation of an independent jury and was invited to draw up an urban strategy which, after consultation with all the local authorities concerned, was officially approved. Subsequently Jean-Paul Baietto created a panel of experts -- architects, planners, critics -- to provide long-term quality control of the development, and to advise on the choice of architects for the various components within Koolhaas's masterplan. Finally, in May 1990, the Euralille `Societe d'economie mixte' was established, with both public and private sector interests, to realise the project.

On a site surrounded by the city, but both cut off from it and cut about by arterial boulevards, peripherique and railway, Koolhaas has planned a dense yet permeable 40ha urban development, concentrated on the north-south TGV axis and its trapezoidal interface with the existing Lille rail terminus and town centre. His conceptual point of departure was the new Lille-europe TGV station, built to designs by SNCF chief architect Jean-Marie Duthilleul. As Koolhaas puts it: `the concept of a view to and from the TGV is fundamental to the legibility of the project as a whole, its raison d'etre'. Intentionally playing up the imbroglio of the site's transport infrastructures, he has devised a stratified staccato concatenation of component forms -- Grand Palais, office development, commercial and cultural centre, business school, housing and so on -- intended to give Euralille some sort of contextual coherence and at the same time provide it with an evolutionary hybrid identity recognisable both in local and international terms.

The first phase of Euralille is now rapidly nearing completion. Within die Koolhaas masterplan, Christian de Portzamparc and Claude Vasconi have each set up `signal' office towers bestriding the TGV station while Jean Nouvel's 52000[m.sup.2] commercial and cultural centre, with its town side alignment of stumpy towers and `fifth facade' roof canopy sweeping down to the lower ground level Place d'Europe in front of the new TGV interchange, will open this autumn. It is, however, appropriate that Koolhaas and OMA's own distinctive architectural contribution to Euralille (with Donald Van Dansik of OMA as job architect and in association with Lille architect Francois Delhay) should be the first building to be completed following the inauguration last May of the Lille-Europe TGV interchange.

Indeed, the Grand Palais is seen as the driving force of Euralille. The planners intend it to replace existing overused conference facilities, freeing diem for cultural use, while at the same time expanding and improving on Lille's established role as a venue for regional and international trade fairs, notably Indigo, the annual world textile fair. Moreover, die new Grand Palais is contiguous with the old trade fair site and its 1924 Palais des Exposititions, strikingly remodelled in 1950-51 by Gauthier Herve and Jean Prouve. Situated at the south end of Euralille, deftly shoe-horned into its promontory site hemmed by boulevards, slip-roads and railway tracks, Koolhaas's vast 300m elliptical building -- `a conceptual saucer' as he terms it, but promptly dubbed 'the egg' by locals -- coolly assumes its present inhospitable surroundings.

At the south end of the site, the dynamic, elliptical sweep of die building's shell is corralled by the extended ground floor containing parking for 1230 cars. Its concrete boundary wall has a startling glistening black-lacquered Cyclopean rock-like finish and returns to clasp the base of the town side elevation, stopping short of the main entrance. Above this base and occupying more than half the ellipse, the elevation of the great exhibition hall is largely clad in corrugated plastic sheeting (to be replaced as necessary) sheered out to the overhang of the curving eaves canopy. The main entrance is distinguished by the vast window above it, its glazing economically thrown into relief by 'shingling' the panes of glass. Lighting three stories of promenade galleries in front of committee and seminar rooms, this window is surmounted by the loggia o the banqueting hall which rides like a ship's bridge across the dished roof -- itself conceived as a facade to read from Euralille's towers and from the Lille airport flight path. The presence of the main entrance bay is further signalled by the flamboyant display of steel fire escapes flanking it behind thin pilotis which hereafter carry the eaves canopy around the raked stem of the Zenith rock auditorium at the north apex of the shell. Here, the shiny lacquered facing reappears in another guise for, seen from below, it takes on an apposite Heavy Metal black leather texture. To the railway tracks and ring road, the shell presents an instantly intriguing hermetic metallic face.

Only on entering Lille Grand Palais does its massive scale and spatial complexity spaces become evident. Disconcertingly raked columns introduce flights of stairs and escalators, soaring into the light-filled zone of the principal floor where the core foyer serves the lofty 20 000 [m.sup.2] exhibition area and gives access to three levels of conference facilities including three halls, the largest of which has seating for 1500. Here, corrugated plastic sheeting makes a second appearance, as a false ceiling and to screen tiers of technical galleries and translators' boxes. Throughout the building, inventive use has been made of highly economical finishes.

Lille Grand Palais cost FF 430 000 000 -- a tight budget for a vast multi-purpose international facility of this kind. But, just as with the constraints of the site, Koolhaas and OMA have typically made necessity a virtue, showing chameleon-like dexterity both in exploiting cheap materials and in massing, spatial variety and incident