The EU is breaking records for unpopularity. Its leaders have been rebuffed in referendums in the U.K. and Italy. Anti-Brussels candidates are leading the polls in France and the Netherlands. How has it responded? By unveiling a $350 million new palace in Brussels.

The monstrous new structure, called “Europa,” will house the European Council — one of the many bodies that run the EU. I can best describe it as a vast egg inside a glass cube. If I were a literary critic, I’d call it the EU’s “objective correlative” — the thing that symbolises, in physical form, what is wrong with the entire project.