Buildings that create a city

The City of Justice project came about in response to the need to place Barcelona's judicial infrastructure on a more coordinated footing. At present Barcelona's judiciary authorities are scattered about into seventeen buildings at different locations inside the city. The City of Justice is being built on the site of the old Lepanto Barracks, between the cities of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and Barcelona.

The project, led by British architect David Chipperfield and the b720 architectural firm, is for an area of 213,054 m2 on which will be erected a set of eight buildings of different colours, shapes and heights, with a maximum of fourteen storeys. The four Barcelona courtroom buildings are united by a huge atrium that leads to 130 rooms housing preliminary investigating courts, criminal divisions and civil divisions.

Court activities and the accessory activities that take place in their environment involve the presence of some 3,000 workers and visits by some 12,000 people each day.

From the functional point of view, the complex groups each of the system's jurisdictional units into a single orderly sphere. Together with seven buildings intended for court activities themselves, the complex will include an additional two buildings for complementary uses, basically businesses and offices. The offices are designed for professionals in justice-related fields such as barristers, solicitors, bar associations, and so on.

The complex will have over 5,000 m2 that can be outfitted as commercial space to satisfy the needs of the up-and-running City of Justice, such as restaurants and coffee shops, pharmacies, paperwork-handling agencies, copy shops, news agents, florists, etcetera. The facilities the City of Justice is equipped with are:

• General Facilities. Judicial Uses:
  
  • 100 hearing courtrooms  
  • 166 trial courtrooms  
  • Legal Medicine Institute of Cataluña  
  • 40 offices shared by 80 doctors  
  • 25 identification rooms  
  • 4 special identification rooms  
  • 4 double autopsy rooms  
  • 2 special rooms  

• General Facilities. Judicial Uses:
  
  • 25,000 metres of filing space in rooms specially prepared for the storage of paper and computer files  
  • An auditorium seating 500  

• Parking services