Royal Palace of Brussels

The Palace of Coudenberg, Jan Brueghel the Younger, c. 1627

The first building on the Coudenberg hill was constructed between the second half of the 11th and first half of the 12th century.[3] At that time, it probably looked like a fortified castle forming a part of the city's fortifications. It was the home of the Dukes of Brabant who also resided in the nearby city of Leuven and in the Castle of Tervuren.[4] In the following centuries, it was rebuilt, extended, and improved, in line with the increased prestige of the Dukes of Brabant and their successors; the Dukes of Burgundy, the Emperor Charles V, the Archduke Albert of Austria and Infanta Isabel of Spain and successive Governors of the Habsburg Netherlands.

The Aula Magna, a gigantic room for royal receptions and other pageantry, was built for Philip the Good in the 15th century.[5][6] The first regular meetings of the States-General, composed of delegates from the middle class, clergy and nobility of the Burgundian Netherlands, were held there in 1465. It was in this room that in 1515 Margaret of Austria formally relinquished her regency over the Low Countries to Charles von Habsburg, and the future Emperor Charles V became the Duke of Burgundy. It was also in this same room that, 40 years later, Charles V abdicated in favour of his son, Philip II of Spain.[6]

This impressive complex suffered several fires over the centuries. In 1679, a fire destroyed part of the roof. A large fire that broke out on 3 February 1731 almost completely destroyed the building. Only the court chapel and the walls of the Aula Magna were somewhat spared.[7][8] The ruins only disappeared when the district was redeveloped after 1775. At that time the urban axes of the present-day Brussels Park were laid out. The Place Royale/Koningsplein was built on top of the ruined palace. Excavations of the site by different archaeological organisations have unearthed various remains of different parts of the palace as well as the surrounding town. The monumental vaults remaining under the square and its surrounding buildings can be visited.

The Fire of 1679 in the Coudenberg Palace by Gillis van Auwerkercken

Charles Alexander of Lorraine, at that time Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands had a new palace, the Palace of Charles of Lorraine, built on the nearby site of the former Palace of Orange-Nassau.[9] The Palace of Charles of Lorraine is now part of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR)[9] and the old palace's garden was redesigned as a public park. On the northern side, a new building for the Council of Brabant was built by the French architect Gilles-Barnabé Guimard, which today houses the Belgian Federal Parliament and is known as the Palace of the Nation. On the other side of the park (the building plot of the present-day palace), the middle axis of the park continued as a street between two newly built mansions. One served as the residence of the Abbot of the nearby Coudenberg Abbey, while the other was inhabited by important government members.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Brussels became (together with The Hague) the joint capital of the new established United Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was under the rule of William I of the Netherlands that the street was covered and the two mansions were joined with a gallery. The newly created 'palace' received a new neoclassical facade designed by the architect Tilman-François Suys with a peristyle in the middle, and a balcony with a wrought iron parapet surrounding the entire first floor.

The Royal Palace in 1852

The street running alongside the new palace was widened and thus the Place des Palais/Paleizenplein ("Square of the Palaces") was created. The new square's name uses the plural form, because another palace was built on the left side of the Royal Palace. This new building (1823) was designed as the residence of the Crown Prince called the Prince of Orange (the future King William II of the Netherlands). Today, it houses the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium (RASAB) and is consequently called the Academy Palace. The rooms and salons of the old mansions were incorporated in the new Royal Palace and were only partly refurnished. Some of them survived all the 19th and 20th centuries' renovations and are still partly intact today. A major addition to the interior decoration from the time of William I is the so-called 'Empire Room' which was designed as a ballroom. It has a very refined cream and gold decoration designed and executed by the famous French sculptor François Rude.

The palace is used for state occasions at court.

After the Belgian Revolution, the palace was offered to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when he ascended the throne as H.M. Leopold I, the first King of the Belgians. Just like his predecessor, William II, he used the palace mainly for official receptions and other representational purposes and lived in the Royal Palace of Laeken. During his reign (until 1865), little was changed to the palace. It was his son and successor, King Leopold II, who judged the building to be too modest for a king of his stature, and who kept on enlarging and embellishing the palace until his death in 1909. During his reign, the palace nearly doubled in surface. After the designs of his architect Alphonse Balat, imposing rooms like the Grand Staircase, the Throne Room and the Grand Gallery were added. Balat also planned a new facade but died before the plans could be executed.

It was only after 1904 that the new facade was executed after new plans by Henri Maquet. The pediment sculpture shows an allegorical figure of Belgium flanked by groups representing Industry and Agriculture, by the sculptor Thomas Vinçotte. The new design includes a formal front garden separating the building from the Place des Palais.

As often mentioned, it has a facade 50% longer than that of Buckingham Palace in London but its floor area of 33,027 m² (355,500 sq ft) is less than half of Buckingham Palace's floor area at 77,000 m² (830,000 sq ft).[10]

• Smolar-Meynart, Arlette; Vanrie, André; Soenen, Micheline (1991). Le Palais de Bruxelles : huit siècles d'art et d'histoire (in French). Brussels: Crédit communal. ISBN 978-2-87193-142-3.
• Wasseige, Manoëlle (1995). Le Quartier Royal. Bruxelles, ville d'Art et d'Histoire (in French). Vol. 15. Brussels: Éditions de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale.
• Le Patrimoine monumental de la Belgique: Bruxelles (PDF) (in French). Vol. 1C: Pentagone N-Z. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. 1994.