OMA completes six-sided glass courthouse in Lille

Lille has a sharp new addition to its skyline: a six-sided courthouse wrapped in coloured glass.

OMA, the Rotterdam-based architecture practice, has completed the Palais de Justice de Lille in Lille, northern France, according to details published on 19 October 2026 Dezeen. The building was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice in Paris to house the city's high and district courts.

The form is deliberately pointed. The courthouse is hexagonal in plan, with six angled sides that come to sharp edges. Each elevation is finished in faceted panels of coloured glass, intended to mimic the stone of the fortress next door.

That neighbour shapes the whole project. The courthouse stands in open landscape beside a star-shaped fortification built in 1667 by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the French military engineer famed for his ring of fortresses. OMA says any new addition to Lille has to address the past, the present and the future OMA.

The practice describes the design as a nested building, essentially a building within a building. The idea is easy to read from the outside, where one crisp volume appears to sit inside another. OMA has said the design was inspired by Lille's location and history Architect Magazine.

Inside, the courthouse is arranged as three volumes over a base that the public can enter freely. The low plinth, the solid platform at the bottom of the building, holds the major courtrooms where the largest cases are heard. Above it rises a triangular central tower containing smaller courtrooms.

Around that tower runs the third element, a faceted ring of offices. The ring wraps the tower closely, so judges, clerks and lawyers work around the rooms where hearings take place. The layout keeps circulation short and separates public routes from private ones.

There is also space that belongs to everyone. A public plaza runs at ground level and gives the building an open forecourt. Higher up, a roof garden looks out over the city and the old fortress walls.

The project has been eight years in the making. OMA won the competition to design the courthouse in 2018 after being awarded the maîtrise d'oeuvre contract, the French term for the lead design commission, by the ministry. It had originally been due to complete in 2023, and OMA now lists it as a 2026 project.

What makes this stand out is the attempt to make a courthouse feel open. Court buildings can seem closed and forbidding. Here the accessible base, plaza and garden pull the street into a place usually kept apart.