Legal framework.

This new courthouse for the Oslo region is next to the VG offices shown in our last issue. But while that commercial building appropriately forms part of the urban matrix, the capital's seat of justice must take on the character of a democratic monument.

The new Oslo district law courts are literally next door to the Verdens Gang building (AR June, pp46-51). If you walk down Apotekergate along VG's arcade, you come to a pale grey granite wall that inflects you into C.J. Hambros plass, a rather ungainly open space that perhaps once had some sort of urban presence but has lost most of its form to traffic, trams and successive rebuildings. Here, it is clear that the architects of the law courts had a quite different aim from Kjell Lund and his colleagues who were concerned to make the VG block a dignified, humane yet undemonstrative part of the matrix of the city. The Ostgaard team wanted to make something of a monument of their building-rightly, for what could be more worthy of honorific treatment than the local seat of justice? And they wanted to add presence to poor old C.J. Hambro.

The facade which faces the plass has been drawn back a little from the original building line to allow the building's symmetrical presence to be appreciated. The granite elevation, which seems almost white on a sunny day, is focused on the main entrance which is used by both the public and those who work in the court. The arrangement is vaguely Renaissance, with a base course comprising the bottom two storeys (an almost blind arcade and a first floor with wooden shutters). Above this is a massive mid-part which grows out of a sort of piano nobile generated by projecting upwards etiolated versions of the first floor windows.

At the top there is a glazed attic storey with a metal brise-soleil forming a cornice against the sky. A balcony at second floor level makes a porch over the entrance. (Is it to be used for proclaiming the latest judgements? Scarcely likely in such an undeclaratory country.) A thin glass nose rises from this level to be topped by a flagpole - perhaps a reference to Gullichsen's Stockmann corner in Helsinki (AR March 1990 p48). There are memories of Asplund and Ostberg, but the composition is abstracted, and it has none of the coarse knowingness and vulgar gesturing of Post-Modern Classicism. Yet it is certainly a Post-Modern facade, for it is clearly a plane which is collaged to granite side planes by re-entrant angles of glass and grey metal (in fact, the granite is in relatively thin sheets cladding solid in-situ concrete walls).

Behind the front is a plan which brings the irregular site into clear order. The front door leads to a wide narthex that opens into a glazed atrium, the focus of the whole complex. A curved shaft of vertical circulation whizzes up the whole height of the toplit void. On the lower eight floors of the shaft Ole Lislerud has made a ceramic decoration which with its strange use of mythical writing recalls the great wall that Snohetta want to put round the library of Alexandria (AR June 1990). Above the glass, there is a huge cut-away silver cylinder (that Norberg-Schulz describes as an exedra - in Byggekunst 6 1994 p384) which is intended to focus light into the atrium and to act as a landmark in the city.

There are no less than 52 different courtrooms in the building, of all sizes and for all kinds of case, both civil and criminal. The largest are on the lower floors facing on to Hambros plass to reduce walking distances. Public and officials reach the courts from circulation round the atrium, but there is a separate circulation system for the accused and their mentors which connects to the basement cells by special-lifts. There is no third circulation system for the judges and jury as is common in Anglo-Saxon court systems (in fact, except in the High Court, there are no juries - cases at district court level are judged by a collegium consisting of two lay judges and a professional one).

Many smaller courtrooms have no windows, but the atrium and the large perimeter allow most of the larger courts to have some sense of the time of day and the state of the weather. Offices tend to be set on upper floors and on north, south and east sides of the building so that they too look out over the city or into the atrium. The staff canteen is on a balcony in the atrium at second floor level - how different from the arrangements in most European court buildings Where for reasons of secrecy and security, court officials are hardly seen except when performing their duties.

Though dignified and efficient, the new building sets a standard of decency and openness appropriate for an advanced democracy and searches for a form of monumentalism that represents the majesty of justice without over-emphasising the power of the state or that of the dominant class, as most court buildings of the last 200 years have done. It has presence without being pompous, and is reminiscent of the noblest days of Scandinavian architecture when the search was for forms and spaces that can embody the ethos of decent, egalitarian societies.