Courting rights - law courts, Strasbourg, France

Architectural Review, The, July, 1995 by Peter Davey

Strasbourg is one of Europe's most pleasant cities, with its medieval core on an island between the river III and the urban moat. The core is surrounded by elegant nineteenth-century suburbs in which Art Nouveau and Jugendstil are mixed as almost nowhere else, for Strasbourg, a rich city on the west bank of the Rhine, has been struggled over by France and the German powers throughout its history. It was part of Germany from 1870 to 1918 (and again of course from 1940-1944); during the first of these periods, the newly unified and increasingly prosperous German Empire was anxious to make its mark on its possession and on the whole did so with a good deal of elegance and sympathy for the existing fabric (though the 1888 Emperor's palace is as heavy a piece of imperial neo-Baroque as can be found anywhere).

The city's history was a major factor in its choice as one of the capitals of Europe when the first par-European organisations began to evolve in the late 1940s. A site for the new institutions was chosen on the edge of the nineteenth-century suburban ring some one and a half kilometres from the old city at the junction of the III and the Canal de la Marne-au-Rhin.

Here are some of the most lumpen administrative buildings built anywhere at any time. They make the Kaiser's palace seem almost welcoming and playful. The most monstrous of all is the Palais de l'Europe, in which representatives of the 34 nations that belong to the Council of Europe meets to deliberate on our rights and duties.(1) The Palais, built by Henri Bernard in 1977, seems to have been created more for the defence of bureaucracy than celebration of democratic civilisation. A huge square, supported on vast double buttresses, it has slit windows that peer out of great battered walls like the machine-gun slits of a blockhouse writ large. The place offers neither welcome, nor joy, nor inspiration. It is the apotheosis of post-war French techno-monumentalism, and faced with it, you need a huge infusion of faith to believe that the idea of a Europe of cooperative nations has any nobility at all.(2)

That a repetition of this disaster was avoided when the Palais des Droits de l'Homme outgrew its rather decent neo-Corbusian quarters huddled in the shadow of the Council building was due entirely to President Mitterrand. As head of state of the country in which the court is located, he was asked to lay the foundation stone of a new building on the east side of the Bassin de l'III, the triangular pool where river and canal meet. On seeing the drawings, Mitterrand declined point-blank to undertake the ceremony and demanded that the design be the result of a competition.

An invited contest was rapidly organised in the spring of 1989. The first stage included O.M. Ungers and Rafael Moneo, but the second stage (held in August of the same year) was between Dominique Perrault and the Richard Rogers Partnership. Perrault's scheme was a rather rigid rectangular affair that had a family resemblance to the great Paris library (p60). The Rogers proposal had a looser parti, more responsive to the curve of the river and capable of expansion. Both factors helped Rogers win.

The architects talk about their creation having a head and a tail. The head is a pair of large drums which overlap with and are joined by a generous central glass cylinder. Both the outer cylinders have chamfered tops. The larger one is the chamber of the European Court of Human Rights; the smaller, westerly one is the formal meeting place of the Commission. The court works like almost any other appeals tribunal, with the judges arranged in a horseshoe facing the parties to the case and their lawyers, behind whom are the public in curved rows of seats. The Commission's chamber is a place for arbitration, hence there is no public area, the space can be smaller and it can look out over the river and the basin. Seen in plan, and to some extent in reality, the head resembles that of a heraldic insect like a dragon-fly.

Between head and tail is a kind of thorax which contains major conference rooms, the canteen at the level of the river bank overlooking the water and the chambers of the senior offices of the Court and Commission on top. The tail is made up of offices and is in fact two tails that unite at the thorax. Their curve follows that of the river bank, with the westerly (riverside) half ranging from six stories over a podium next to the thorax down to two at the northern end. The eastern half of the tail is a storey lower, and because of the site's shape rather shorter.

Seen from across the river, the complex loses much of its entomological quality and instead becomes rather nautical: a tug or icebreaker with its blunt heavy silver prow thrusting towards the basin and the city, followed by the funnel and mast complex (the cluster of vertical services between the entrance hall and the conference rooms), then the long stepping curves of the offices as the decks. Such images are likely to be modified radically in future as the planting grows. The office floors have continuous troughs outside the continuous strips of windows; soon the concrete floor edges will be obscured by shaggy verdure and the tails at least will look like huge pieces of topiary. The effect will be even more intense when you look from the north down the slot between the two tails. Here, water emerges from a spout at first floor level at the inner end of the slot. It falls into a series of rectangular pools, cascading towards the northern end surrounded by planting that will make the whole slot into a picturesque green gorge. It is difficult to imagine that the lowest offices at the inner end of the cleft will not be rather dark (though I went on a dull day, and conditions may be better at sunnier times). In general, office windows are provided with external Venetian blinds which are lowered automatically when the sun becomes intense enough to start overheating them. (An element of individual control is to be introduced so that not all offices have to be screened when one begins to get too hot.) Apart from the chambers and one or two other sensitive places, there is no artificial cooling in the building; equable temperatures are to be obtained in the double banked offices by a combination of shading and natural ventilation through openable windows - and by the thermal mass of the concrete.