Josep Fosés in running to design Palais de Justice in Paris

Catalan architect shortlisted for the project

Catalan architect slated to design Paris justice hall | Josep Fosés is an architect who has done most of his work in Girona - restorations in the old town, adapting a former hospital to serve as an administrative center for the regional government, besides a reworking of the façades that look down on the Onyar river.

Now, together with two other designs by a French and a Dutch team, he has just won an international competition of ideas - 275 plans were presented - for a new Palais de Justice in the French capital. Once the final plan is decided on, it will replace the present courthouse, located in a different quarter.

“The idea was a building that would respect the spirit of the neighborhood, so powerfully suggested by Tardi’s drawing Brouillard au pont du Tolbiac (Fog at Tolbiac Bridge). It’s a neighborhood of people, of railways and industrial materials,” explains Fosés, who says he is irritated by “architects who try to put on a show, building their own thing in disregard of what surrounds it, and of what the area has been and still is.”

In Paris, while presenting his plan to the public, Fosés remarked that “architects ought to worry less about aesthetics and more about ethics,” while questioning certain ideas of monumentality associated with buildings that seek to symbolize the power of justice. The competition called for 100,000 square meters’ worth of facilities, while preserving the halle designed by the engineer Eugène Freyssinet in 1929.

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