Conseil de l'Europe
Fortress-faced modern headquarters with narrow window slits, built on a former winter ice rink.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Conseil de l'Europe in Strasbourg starts on a surprising patch of ground: a public ice rink that flooded every winter through the 1930s, on the same site where diplomats now walk in dark suits. It follows the site into the 1970s, when the tennis courts and rink were cleared for a new headquarters, built after Pierre Graber laid the first stone in 1972 and Valery Giscard d'Estaing inaugurated it in 1977. Architect Henry Bernard gave the exterior narrow, fortress-like windows while opening the interior into wide, fluid spaces centered on a shell-shaped debating chamber. The European Parliament once shared these walls for twenty-two years before moving elsewhere.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
European Court of Human Rights
Twin glass courtroom drums, expanded mid-build as new member states kept joining.
European Parliament | Strasbourg
Glass-and-steel debating chamber used only twelve times a year under a decades-old treaty compromise.
Lieu d'Europe
Eighteenth-century country villa turned museum on the history of European integration.
Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Glass-walled riverside hall on a former slaughterhouse site, with a hundred-meter luminous nave.
Palais du Rhin
Neo-Renaissance former imperial palace of pink Vosges sandstone, modeled loosely on Florence's Pitti Palace.
Synagogue de la Paix
Modernist concrete synagogue clad in thin stone panels, its facade a dense lattice of forged stars of David.