OMA completes hexagonal Palais de Justice de Lille in coloured glass

OMA has completed the Palais de Justice de Lille, a six-sided law court in northern France with a faceted facade lined with coloured glass.

The Dutch studio, officially known as Office for Metropolitan Architecture, delivered the building for the French Ministry of Justice. It houses the city's high and district courts.

The courthouse sits in a verdant landscape next to a star-shaped fortification built in 1667 by the French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. OMA's pointy, hexagonal form and coloured-glass elevations take their cue from that fortress.

How is the building organised?

The complex stacks three volumes on a publicly accessible base:

• A plinth holding the major courtrooms
• A triangular central tower containing the minor courtrooms, extending from the plinth
• A faceted ring of offices surrounding the tower, which helps draw light into the building

According to OMA, each volume has "its own material expression and spatial character, reinforcing clarity and orientation throughout the complex".

The volumes don't read as three separate buildings, though. Light finishes and furnishings unify them, along with an ambition to feel welcoming and "free of the intimidation", the studio added.

What does the public get?

A series of outdoor spaces is distributed across the three volumes. They include a public plaza at ground level and a roof garden overlooking the city.

The public base makes the courthouse a permeable piece of civic infrastructure rather than a sealed institutional block — a deliberate stance for a building type that usually signals authority through mass.

Why did it take so long?

OMA won the competition to design the courthouse in 2018 and originally planned to finish it in 2023. The completed building arrives roughly three years after that initial target.

Founded in 1975 in Rotterdam, OMA has stayed busy on other fronts. Recent work includes an affordable housing development in San Francisco and a pyramidal building in Hangzhou designed as a "three-dimensional village".

The Lille courthouse joins a small crop of high-profile law courts by major studios, among them Renzo Piano Building Workshop's Toronto courthouse, which aims to display "the identity and values of a modern justice institution", and a 10-storey federal courthouse by SOM currently under development in Florida. As courts increasingly compete to appear open rather than imposing, OMA's fortress-inspired glass hexagon offers one of the more literal translations of that brief — a defensive geometry turned luminous.