The Eurotopie project will confront the major challenges and imperatives encountered by the European Union’, this year’s Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale proclaims, ‘as it analyses its key territorial, physical and symbolic presence in Brussels.’

As the UK bids farewell to the EU, the AR turns to Belgium – the adopted centre of Europe and a fertile petri dish of a new, exciting and prolific architectural culture. Jonathan Meades celebrates the country’s ‘multiple identities, its sublime painters, its eccentric writers, its formidable gastronomy, its thrilling urbanism, its magnificent suburbanism’, despite remaining a ‘specialised and apparently perverse taste’. Belgian houses, we are reminded in this month’s Outrage, are characteristically ugly.

Belgium has a difficult and painful history, with a blood-stained colonial legacy in Congo which is more multi-layered than it may at first seem. It is a country divided, into Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north, French-speaking Wallonia in the south, a small German-speaking corner to the east and bilingual Brussels in the middle. As the home of European justice, the law court is Tom Wilkinson’s Typology this month.