PURE JUSTICE.

A new Palais de Justice, in Nantes, is a brooding presence on the banks of the Loire and the latest in a series of regional law courts in France.

Jean Nouvel's maverick architectural talents have emerged again in the design of a sepulchral new Palais de Justice in Nantes at the mouth of the Loire. The building is a consequence of a review of the French justice system, begun over 10 years ago, and the latest in an ambitious programme to build regional law courts in over 20 departements throughout France. Like other commissions (for Architecture Studio, AR September 1997; Richard Rogers, AR July 1999; and recently Christian de Portzamparc), this one was won in competition and adds to the country's growing stock of gestural essays by eminent architects. The building stands on an island, where the Loire splits in two, looking across the river to the centre of Nantes. Around it are decaying factories and warehouses, detritus of a thriving industrial and maritime past that fed the prosperity of this solid bourgeois town. The area is due for renewal and regeneration.

Nouvel has constructed a black Miesian box of glass and steel, 'very silent and balanced'. He wanted it, he says, to be very clear and precise'. As an essay in mathematical abstraction it is extreme, designed without compromise on an 8x8m grid. On the north side, facing the town, a portico with slender steel columns rises three storeys high and supports a projecting layer of offices giving onto peripheral terraces. The portico heralds an immense lobby running the width of the building behind which, distributed inside three separate self-contained boxes, are three main courts of justice, four smaller ones and ancillary offices.

If Mies occasionally subverted rationality with opulence, Nouvel subverts it with a black, sometimes surreal, imagination (remember the terrifying vortex piercing the vitals of the family department store of Printemps in Berlin?, ARJuly 1996; or the stripped down industrial tobacco shed aesthetic embodied in the architecture of the St James Hotel, Bordeaux, rather at odds with the plentiful embonpoints of its gourmandizing clientele, AR August 1990).

In Nantes, you are confronted by the glazed lobby which rising to a gridded ceiling renders you Lilliputian. At the back are three metallic screens, like those cladding the back of the building; underfoot, the mirror-like polish of the black floor creates a pool of shifting light and reflections blurring boundaries. This building is replete with metaphor. Behind the screens, the three enormous boxes containing the courtrooms have outer surfaces like chiselled cliff faces, composed of projecting and indented black wooden blocks. Inside, the courtrooms lined and furnished in the same wood, and illuminated by oblique shafts of light, are the colour of blood.

In an age cushioned by euphemism these law courts are shocking. You must wonder whether Breton crime levels deserve so brooding a vision of Nemesis (locals complain on entering that they are already in prison). But if Nouvel's expression of justice seems simplistic, his refusal to deal in euphemisms has something admirable about it. Rejecting the present tendency to disguise courthouses as art centres ('Justice should express its power'), he has not tried to make the workings of penal law friendly to those summoned to its precincts. Instead, his black temple consecrated to the pure ideal of justice conveys its pitiless logic.

Architect

Architectures Jean Nouvel, Paris

Project architects

Jean Nouvel, Isabelle Guillauic,

Jean Pierre Bouanha, Anne Favry,

Hafid Rakem, Gaston Tolila

Photographs

Paul Raftery

1. North face.

2. Portico and entrance to lobby.

3. West corridor, and stairs to lower ground level.

4. Three metal grilles screen courtrooms.

5. Corridor between courtrooms, reception and city centre beyond.

6,7. Courtroom.

1. lobby

2. reception

3. courtroom

4. office

5. void