Court of Justice of the European Communities / Dominique Perrault Architecture

Save this picture!

+ 28

Text description provided by the architects. Invited to create a new extension and to triple the Court’s capacity from 50,000 sq metres (538,195 sq ft) to 150,000 sq metres (1.6 million sq ft), Perrault’s challenge was not only to increase space but also to give harmony to a building that had already been extended three times. First inaugurated in 1973, when the European Community included only six member countries, the Court of Justice was extended in 1988, 1993 and 1994. As Perrault saw it, the scheme’s challenge was threefold: functional, urban and institutional.