De Gasperi Building

For forty years there was only one tall building in Luxembourg, and everyone just called it the Héichhaus, the High House. It is this one: twenty-three storeys, seventy-seven metres, built between 1960 and 1965 by the architects Michel Mousel and Gaston Witry for the secretariat of the European Parliament, and inaugurated on the 24th of October 1966 on the same day as the Red Bridge that leads to it and the Robert Schuman monument on the other side of the valley. Until 2008 nothing in the country stood higher.

It was the first European building on the Kirchberg. In the early 1960s the plateau was farmland, and the decision to put the European institutions up here — rather than in the old town, where the Court of Justice was working out of a villa — is what turned it into the quarter of glass and steel you are standing in. The Parliament's staff worked here until 2001; the Council of Ministers still comes in April, June and October, when the ministers of the twenty-seven meet in Luxembourg rather than Brussels, and the plenary hall inside seats three hundred. The building was gutted and rebuilt between 2001 and 2012, stripped of its asbestos and folded into the European Conference Centre, with the environment ministry's two hundred civil servants in the upper floors.

It is named after Alcide De Gasperi, the Italian prime minister who, with Schuman and Adenauer, is counted among the founders of the European project — a Luxembourg tower with an Italian name, on a French-named avenue, in a quarter that belongs to all of them.