Brussels skyline and views - part 2
VIEWS FROM ATOMIUM

Brussels is a mostly flat city, but is also has some hills, the city center actually consist of a lower and an upper town. Around Place Poelaert and Place de l'Albertine you can watch great views of Brussels. Since Brussels is a financially and politically very important city, it has a few tall buildings and skyscrapers, more then the average European city actually. There is a large, growing CBD (Central Business District) just to the North of the city center, the only one in Belgium. Here you will find the Finance Tower (Tour Finances), that is the city's 2nd tallest building in Belgium (145m), but the tallest if you count the mast on top (174m).
But the tallest building in Belgium officially, the 150m tall Tour du Midi, you will find in the Midi district to the soutwest of the city center. Both the tallest buildings are pretty old, but their exteriors have been recladded and modernized. At the river, pretty close to the CBD, you will find Up-site that is about being completed during our visit (2014), a mixed use 42-storey, 142m tall skyscraper. Other notable skyscrapers in the CBD is Dexia Tower, a 37-storey glass skyscraper with diagonal lines, Belcago Towers, 2 glass towers with a skybridge and a mast and some early 1970s buildings like World Trade Center and Manhattan Center. Many of the skyscrapers of Brussels have glass facades. Just southeast of the CBD, you find Madou Plaza, a 34-storey from 2004 and Tour Astro from 1976. You will also find several tall hotels and office buildings spread out over the city.

In the Old Town, the only fairly tall buildings are the Town Hall -that is totally dominating, King's House and the St Michael's Cathedral. In the suburbs you will find Belgium's tallest structure, Sint-Pieters-Lieeuw TV tower (300m), and in the outskirts there are some fairly tall churches, like the Basilica of the Sacred Hearts. The futuristic, 102m tall, Atomium from 1958, is probably Brussels most famous structure on the skyline, but it is located in the far Northern outskirts, so it is not included in any skyline.

The huge EU buildings are rather built on the lenght then height however; for example Espace Léopold, the largest complex consist of 3 rows of buildings, about 400m wide and has about 15 floors, that could be really tall if built on the height.

In this part we show how the skyline looks from the futuristic monument Atomium and from the plane during landing at Brussels Airport.