Exterior view
In 1860 Poelaert became a member of the commission overseeing the competition for a new Palais de Justice, Brussels. None of the 28 designs submitted was awarded a prize; instead, a proposal made by Poelaert in 1862 was approved by the Minister of Justice, to whom he insisted on being personally and solely responsible for the execution of the building. He effectively ceased all other professional activities to concentrate on this project (built 1866-83), which was intended to comprise a structure of 20,000 sq. m costing three million Belgian francs but which ended up nearly 30% larger and costing some 50 million francs.
The gigantic scale and conspicuous site of the Palais de Justice - Poelaert’s masterpiece - made him the best-known Belgian architect of the mid-19th century. The structure rises in a series of heavy colonnaded masses to a high cupola; it terminates the prestigious Rue de la R�gence in Brussels, overlooks its working-class core and visually dominates the entire city. The building’s political promoters conceived it as a monument that, by virtue of its size and position as well as its classicizing style and sculptural programme, would dramatize the triumph of secularism over the religious traditions embodied in the various Gothic and Gothic Revival monuments of the city.
The success of the building was due wholly to the crushing iconographic power of its shape and dramatic interior spaces. Its academicist plan, with multiple axes of long, often redundant corridors and staircases outlining immense empty volumes on many levels, proved almost dysfunctional. Sometimes categorized as Baroque Revival, the Palais de Justice is really an eclectic composition, with N�o-Grec, Neo-classical and Renaissance Revival elements disposed with great originality and always with an eye to scenographic rather than architectonic effect.
The photo shows the main fa�ade.
