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Brussels to get new courthouse
A new courthouse will be constructed near the site of the current Palace of Justice in Brussels, reports De Standaard. The city has already received several building permit applications for the new courthouse, which will be within 500 metres of the current courthouse.
Last year, specialists from the Brussels property market were asked to suggest locations for a new courthouse in the European capital. They nominated five possible sites, all within the required 500m radius around the current location.
Private developers will construct the new building at one of the suggested sites and then lease the building to the Belgian Buildings Agency (Régie des Bâtiments), which manages all the courthouses in the country.
Candidate developers have already begun submitting building permit applications for the ambitious project to make sure their first rough proposals will pass the building codes and to have all administration out of the way before the time comes to start building.
One proposal, submitted by the architecture firm Jaspers-Eyers, suggests a new courthouse with an area of 33,600 square metres, seven storeys high and with four underground levels. The current courthouse is 15,000 square metres.
Comments
What will be done with the existing courthouse? One hopes, either fix it, or demolish it!
The handsome (but falling apart) current courthouse has had scaffolding on it since the 1970's, the dome was renovated very nicely decades ago, and there was a competition on how to upgrade the current courthouse building. What ever happened??? In any other large metropolitan city, the exterior of this structure would have been cleaned, windows replaced, landscaping at the front, indirect lighting installed so the frontage highlighted, fountains/trees/benches/lighting in the rondpoint at the front (instead of an ongoing parking lot for vans and police cars), and this building would have been easy on the eyes instead of a constant eyesore.