Ciutat de la Justícia (David Chipperfield)

The Ciutat de la Justicia was built with the aim of bringing together the different legal departments and law courts in Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat in order to improve their functionality. Designed by the British architect David Chipperfield, it opened in 2009 and consists of a series of nine different-sized parallelepipeds of similar appearance. Seven of them seem to have been scattered at random on an esplanade that is used as a public plaza, while the remaining two occupy two adjacent blocks. Four of the buildings are connected by an angular volume that is irregular in shape. The tallest block stands four storeys high and the lowest houses the main lobby, which is extremely spacious, and ensures a smooth flow of visitors while controlling access to restricted areas. The façades of all the blocks consist of a densely packed grid of load-bearing concrete elements with vertical recesses that create a regular rhythm. Each building varies in its three dimensions, but it is the colour, achieved by adding pigments to the concrete, that makes them most distinctive. Chipperfield, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2023, used a very subtle range of colours that makes it easier to identify the different uses of the blocks.