Dataset BUREU Project - Marco Ninno

Europe at Work: Office Spaces and the Making of the European Commission

This dissertation reconstructs the institutional history of the European Commission through the lens of its office spaces, arguing that the material environments in which European civil servants lived and worked were not mere backdrops to integration but active participants in its making. Moving from a historiography that has long focused on the Commission's legislative role or its external architectural presence, this research proposes a bottom-up, 'horizontal' approach to Europeanisation, one attentive to the vecue, the lived experience, of the institution's everyday bureaucratic life. Informed by Material Engagement Theory, the study treats office spaces as constitutive of organisational identity, shaping routines, hierarchies and institutional self-understanding. The dissertation conceptualises the Commission's organisational culture as a dynamic system evolving through periodic 'upgrades', institutional events such as relocations, mergers and enlargements, while exhibiting strong path-dependence that constrained spatial and administrative change alike. By describing what it meant to work in ‘Europe’, this dissertation offers a new material history of Europeanisation, one in which bureaucratic spaces are revealed as constitutive of the very 'European-ness' they were meant to embody.

Throughout, Institutional documentation is complemented by discourse and visual analysis of floor plans and photographs, and by the Courrier du personnel, the Commission's internal staff magazine, which provides a rare bottom-up perspective on how civil servants perceived and contested their spatial environment and their role in the broader European project. Oral history testimonies from the HAEU collections further illuminate practices absent from the official record.