THE MEPs were supposed to take over the "Whim of the Gods' on April 1st. No chance! An unfortunate date, some might say, for the culmination of a fiasco of such proportions.
The final handover, worth some £640 million to the developers of the Espace Leopold, the new Brussels headquarters of the European Parliament, never happened.
The refusal by the Brussels regional authorities to allow the MEPs to use more than 900 of the building's 2,300 car parking spaces - on environmental grounds led the parliamentarians to refuse to accept the building.
The local authority insists that if it accedes to the parliament's demand, traffic in the whole district will seize up. The result may be penalty payments to the builders of up to £2 million a month.
The parliament maintains that the building will be unusable without the parking spaces and therefore cannot be regarded as complete, and that to accept responsibility for it in such circumstances would only be to invite the censure of the Court of Auditors.
(The auditors produced an extremely damning report when contracts were originally signed without any final estimate of cost and against the advice of the parliament's own financial controller.)
Now the hope is that the Brussels Region, meeting on April 17th, will accept a deal to phase in use of the extra parking as and when MEPs can show it is needed and not too disruptive.
The dispute over this glass and steel giant, appropriately nicknamed the Caprice des Dieux because its dome is the same shape as the box of a well-known French cheese of that name, is only the latest episode in the long and unhappy saga of EU institutional construction in this once-charming neighbourhood.
In 1960 the European quarter was 31 per cent offices and 49 per cent residential, largely cobbled streets and fine townhouses.
Today housing occupies less than 10 per cent of the area, offices over 70 per cent, and it is part concrete sprawl, part derelict or semi-derelict sites, a grotesque contrast of scales and styles.
That transformation began with the designation of Brussels as the site of the 1958 World Fair, and the widening of the twin axes of destruction in the area, the Rue Belliard and Rue de Ia Loi.
The familiar Berlaymont building, former Commission HQ and symbol for long of the EEC, which is now being stripped at huge cost of the 3,000 tonnes of asbestos in its ceilings, was completed only in 1968. When the refurbishment is finished it will once again accommodate the Commission.
In 1995 they completed, just opposite, the new premises for the Council of Ministers, the Justus Lipsius building. It is a hideous red granite fortress, built to a specification that it could withstand a rocket attack by a passing terrorist. By the time it opened it was already too small.
With EU enlargement looming, more room is urgently required. But space next door was sold off last year by the Belgian authorities, without consulting the Council, in an attempt to reduce their debt to meet the Maastricht criteria - hoist by their own petard!
With 20,000 EU officials occupying two million square feet of office space in Brussels, some measure of office blight is inevitable.
But it is extraordinary that no central body co-ordinates the property needs of the three mighty institutions and that the region of Brussels has proved utterly incapable of enforcing its own planning regulations, even though its economy is said to benefit to the tune of £3.3 billion annually from the many Eurocrats and hangers-on.
Much of the damage to this quarter is the result of property speculation. Whole streets have been bought up and the houses; then left to fall into disrepair.
The owners have then been able to persuade the mandatory public inquiries that a change to office use is the only viable way of renovating them. Thus, at a stroke, they multiply their value by up to tenfold.
Henri Bernard of the Quartier Leopold Association says bitterly, "They turned wood into gold."
There is at last, however, some hope that the tide of destruction can be halted, although many rear it is too late. Erki Liikanen, the Finnish budget commissioner who lives almost above the office, is determined to spearhead the revitalisation of the area and to create a new relationship with the city and community.
His conversion came shortly after arriving in Brussels, when he was taken by friends to see a black-and-white film set in the city after the war.
"I realised then that the war did not destroy the Quartier Leopold," he told Neil Buckley of the Financial Times. "People did."
His vision is of tree-lined streets, and piazzas with cafes and bars. As a start he is due to announce the creation of a sentier d'Europe, a footpath linking the institutions.
Last year the Commission agreed to freeze construction in the area, moving offices to the suburbs. It has also turned its back on such grandiose projects as that submitted by Madrid architects - to demolish the Berlaymont and replace it with a kilometre-high tower, twice the height of the world's current tallest inhabited building, the Sears Tower in Chicago.
