European Union

Romanian parliamentarians on Wednesday passed a law abolishing the privilege of special pensions for MPs and senators, which are paid out of the state treasury once their mandate ends. The cost of financing the pensions had recently reached 6.9 million euros annually. Is this a victory for justice or are the MPs buying themselves a good conscience at a bargain price?

In a year when COVID-19 has stress-tested privacy protections and where mutual recognition of global data protection regimes has been called into doubt, our rights and regulations have ultimately remained resilient. The question is whether and how we rebuild on those foundations.

Family farming as we know it is under threat and this may be the last generation of EU family farmers, according to Sinn Féin MEP Chris MacManus, who raised concerns over land concentration and called for a larger safety net for small farms. 

Over the past two days, EDA has organised the first ever live-fire cyber exercise specifically dedicated to improving European cooperation between Member States’ national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs). The exercise gathered more than 200 experts from 17 EDA Member States and Switzerland, all of them connecting remotely from their working locations. The event marked the first practical part of the EU MilCERT Interoperability Conference 2021 (MIC), the second part of which will take place in June in Lille/France where the lessons learnt from the exercise and more strategic topics will be discussed.

The objective of this week’s exercise was to bring together military CERTs and observe incident management dynamics with a particular focus on information-sharing, a key factor in modern cyber defence. While European countries have come a long way in establishing mechanisms and processes to exchange information between civilian CERTs, such cooperation and communication channels are much less developed in the military domain, also due to the high sensitivity of the information. Faced with that, many stakeholders have expressed the need to extend the information sharing practices used in civilian circles also to military CERTs and their operations. The new EU Cybersecurity Strategy, released last December, highlighted that this initiative would contribute to significantly increase cooperation among Member States.
Building upon this background, the exercise goal was to experience and observe the dynamics of incident response during realistic live-fire cyber attacks and to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. The outcome and lessons learned from the exercise - as well as the potential follow-on actions required - will be discussed during the second part of the MIC in June in Lille. This part of the MIC will take place co-hosted by the “Forum International de la Cybersécurité”, a leading Cybersecurity event in Europe. Live cyber attacks  The operational environment created for the exercise is based on advanced Cyber Range technology, with professional attackers based in several Member States launching live cyberattacks against infrastructure defended by teams from other Member States. EDA has been active in Cyber Defence exercises for a long time and supports a multinational EU effort in the domain, the ‘Cyber Ranges Federation’ project started in 2014. The exercise also included some military-specific platforms as part of the simulation, including a drone control system and a space ground control station, to be defended from attacks.
The MIC exercise was specifically designed for military CERTs and included platforms, tools and technology specific to the military domain; the entire exercise scenario was conceived in such a way that it used military planning and strategy similar to what is used in real cyber military operations. The intent was not only to provide a realistic scenario, but also to push participants out of their comfort zone, asking them to use all tools, processes and procedures possible, even those not directly at hand in the exercise platform. This allowed for creating an unusually realistic exercise environment.  “Strengthen Europe’s resilience”

The exercise was opened on Wednesday by the Estonian Minister of Defence, Kalle Laanet, and EDA’s Deputy Chief Executive Olli Ruutu. In this opening remarks, Minister Laanet stressed the importance of European cooperation in cyber defence because Member States all face the same or similar threats. “Today we can see that at the EU level civilian CERTs have established good community and their cooperation is improved continuously. However, military CERTs, which play vital role in cyber defence, are not communicating with the same methods. This is understandable considering the more sensitive information they are dealing with. Yet, despite these limitations, it is still important to offer opportunities for extending information-sharing practices. And this live-fire exercise does exactly that”, the Minister said.   He thanked EDA “without their visionary leadership this event would not have taken place”. The exercise allows to build teamwork at national levels and “will strengthen the resilience of the European societies and Europe as a whole”, the Minister said.  

EDA Deputy Chief Executive Olli Ruutu recalled that the Agency has been supporting Member States’ efforts to develop their cyber defence capabilities for a number of years. Today, EDA cyber activities range from defining key priorities at EU level looking at the capability development, R&T and industrial dimensions to facilitate the development of tangible capabilities (such as the Cyber Ranges Federation platform) and the adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and 5G. EDA also runs initiatives in support of Cyber Defence training, education and exercises, he said. “We are working in close cooperation with other EU institutions and agencies, including with ENISA, CERT-EU and the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) in the framework of our quadrilateral Cyber Memorandum of Understanding. And we are also contributing to the EU-NATO cyber dialogue and cooperation in the context of the 2016 and 2018 Joint Declaration, working at different levels with the key cyber actors within the Alliance”, Mr Ruutu stressed. Cooperation between military CERTs is a top priority in EDA’s cyber defence programme as reflected in this exercise and the follow-on conference in Lille in June, he said.

 

Welcome to EURACTIV’s Global Europe Brief, your weekly update on the EU from the global perspective. You can subscribe here. /// EDITOR’s TAKE Munich calls: the annual Munich Security Conference is back with a virtual event later this evening with a...

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Written by Magdalena Pasikowska-Schnass,

© Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2021

The EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture (also known as the EU Mies Award) was launched in recognition of the importance and quality of European architecture. Named after German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a figure emblematic of the Bauhaus movement, it aims to promote functionality, simplicity, sustainability and social vision in urban construction.

Background

Mies van der Rohe was the last director of the Bauhaus school. The official lifespan of the Bauhaus movement in Germany was only fourteen years. It was founded in 1919 as an educational project devoted to all art forms. By 1933, when the Nazi authorities closed the school, it had changed location and director three times. Artists who left continued the work begun in Germany wherever they settled.

Recognition by Unesco

The Bauhaus movement has influenced architecture all over the world. Unesco has recognised the value of its ideas of sober design, functionalism and social reform as embodied in the original buildings, putting some of the movement’s achievements on the World Heritage List. The original buildings located in Weimar (the Former Art School, the Applied Art School and the Haus Am Horn) and Dessau (the Bauhaus Building and the group of seven Masters’ Houses) have featured on the list since 1996. Other buildings were added in 2017.

The list also comprises the White City of Tel-Aviv. German-Jewish architects fleeing Nazism designed many of its buildings, applying the principles of modernist urban design initiated by Bauhaus.

Barcelona Pavilion – Mies van der Rohe Foundation

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of this educational, artistic and experimental school, personified the vitality of Bauhaus. Forced to leave Germany in 1938, he moved to Chicago where, as head of the Illinois Institute of Technology, he helped to develop the ‘second’ Chicago School of Architecture, pushing back the limits of the original Chicago School’s approach to simplified form and ornamentation and the technological achievement of the day – 10-storey skyscrapers.

Not limiting himself to the design of simplified, rectilinear skyscraper buildings, van der Rohe pursued his work on the aesthetics of pavilions, already begun in Europe. Together with Lilly Reich, who was responsible for the interior design, he had created the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. The building, now known as the Barcelona Pavilion, represented the new aesthetics of simplicity, clarity and open spaces, embodying its architect’s guiding principle – ‘less is more’. The pavilion was dismantled once the exposition ended in 1930, but in 1983, work began to rebuild it on the basis of photographs and original drawings and plans. Barcelona City Hall set up the Fundació Mies van der Rohe to accompany the process. Three years later the pavilion became the foundation’s headquarters.

Mies van der Rohe award and EU prize

In 1988, two years after reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion was completed, the first edition of the biennial Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture was launched as a joint initiative of the European Commission and the Mayor of Barcelona. In 2001, the European Commission launched a call for proposals for a ‘European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture’. It was won by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, whose vision for the award included the idea to recognise the work of young architects at the beginning of their professional careers.

Since then, the foundation has been co-organiser of the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture, which is awarded every other year for outstanding architectural works built across Europe (with a main prize of €60 000), and includes an ‘Emerging Architect Special Mention’ (€20 000). The prize is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme, the EU programme supporting culture. Nevertheless, despite recent efforts to popularise it through a dedicated app, and its logo featuring on the websites of winners, finalists, architectural studios and national architectural associations, the prize has a relatively low profile in the EU.

Selection criteria and jury

The award ceremony is held in May in the Barcelona Pavilion, headquarters of the Mies van der Rohe Foundation. A group of independent experts, the member associations of the Architects’ Council of Europe (ACE), other European national architects’ associations and an advisory committee nominate architectural works. The jury then evaluate all the nominations and present a selection of shortlisted and then finalists’ works. The opinions of the users of the architectural works are also taken into consideration.

The selection includes not only private homes and public housing, museums and cultural installations, but also educational, health and sports facilities, as well as large-scale infrastructure projects and transport systems contributing to the construction of European cities. The idea behind the prize is to promote sustainable architectural practice. It reflects the original inspiration of the Bauhaus movement of combining the social, cultural and economic aspects of architecture and the arts.

Recent developments

Recently the prize has reflected the guiding principle of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to do more with less. The approach corresponds to sustainability criteria, with a preference for building more with less material, at a lower cost. The overall objective is to improve people’s lives and the way people live together.

Nominated projects and winners – A variety of works

Conferences, events and exhibitions are held to promote the ‘technological, constructional, social, economic, cultural and aesthetic achievements’ present in nominated and winning projects.

The examples below bear witness to the recent sustainability requirements and the diverse nature of the projects submitted.

Selected winners of the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture:

• 2019 – Transformation of three housing blocks with 530 homes, Grand Parc Bordeaux, France
• 2017 – DeFlat Kleiburg, Amsterdam, Netherlands, transformation of the original building designed by Siegfried Nassuth in 1971, proposing new forms of ‘affordable housing’
• 2015 – Philharmonic Hall, Szczecin, Poland
• 2003 – Car Park and Terminus, Hoenheim North, Strasbourg, France.

Some of the winners of the Emerging Architect Special Mention:

• 2015 – Luz House, Cilleros, Spain, an extremely low-budget project built inside the stone party walls of an existing structure in a small village to create a contemporary dwelling environment using existing resources
• 2009 – Gymnasium 46°09’N/16°50’E, Koprivnica, Croatia, a mixed-use building combining sports hall and school, transforming the suburban periphery by creating an emblematic place for young people
• 2007 – Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The selection process for the 2021 edition had to be rescheduled because of Covid-19 restrictions. The 449 nominees were however announced in January 2021. The nominations reflect a huge variety of works and approaches and include: a metro line; a natural enclave with watchtowers in the area of a former gravel pit; a kindergarten; the revitalisation of former dragoon barracks; houses and a riding centre; a church; a hospital; a ballet school, a city cemetery, the transformation of a classical religious room into a new space for other activities, a daycare centre, a transport hub, an airport, timber dwellings, a home for the homeless, a graphic arts centre, an Olympic centre, a housing cooperative, a public pool, a waste-to-energy plant with an urban recreation centre; and, coming full circle, the expansion of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, named after a famous Hungarian photographer and designer from the Bauhaus movement.

Read this ‘at a glance’ on ‘EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award: A tribute to Bauhaus‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

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