The Campus de la Justicia is a project for the Community of Madrid that brings together the currently dispersed functions of local justice administration in a single site already endowed with good transport links.

This project arouses interest on account of the architectural attributes of the master plan, the quality of the individual proposals, and for the way in which the competitions were organised. The overall layout is by Frechilla & López Peláez, who in 2005 won first prize in the international competition. Most of the 15 buildings that make up the campus were then also commissioned via competitions. The richness of the master plan lies in its conceptual simplicity: the buildings are laid out along a route and are restricted by circular plans of varying radii. Obliged to work within a cylindrical volume, the architects addressed issues of building type, spatial organisation and the skin of the building in response to the established perimeter. The analysis can be simplified by dividing the schemes according to two themes, aware that further interpretations and centralities exist within the complexity of each. In the first group one can place the projects that enforce a confrontation between the volume’s closed form and the external space, involving the surfaces, twisting the skin and giving the cylinder rotation. This group would also include projects that seek dynamic relationships with the context, projecting irregular horizontal circles (either structural or as part of a continuous facade) onto the pure volume. In the second set we might put the projects where terraces and voids of varying heights become the characterising elements, places that give on to courtrooms, as well as horizontal and vertical circulation. The terraces resolve circulation and lighting issues and create surprising diagonal views and interaction with the external space. The scheme by the practice Parades- Pino is commendable for the intensity with which the “in-between” space has been designed. The building’s design is based on a boundary composed of “cells”, which are placed at varying distances from one another according to reciprocal relationships and in relation to the perimeter membrane. In this process the units’ form and function adapts to the whole. The space between the units and the envelope that contains them is compressed, dilated, wraps and turns in the space “between things”, establishing unexpected and intense relationships. Many of the awardwinning schemes use a double skin, the treatment and definition of which ranges from metallic meshes to screen-printed glass, perforated sheet metal whose transparency and capacity to reflect or absorb light varies along the length of the facade, thanks to a freedom to articulate constructive elements offered by contemporary industry. Veronica Scortecci

www.campusjusticiamadrid.com