European Court of Human Rights
Twin glass courtroom drums, expanded mid-build as new member states kept joining.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg follows Richard Rogers's London firm through a 1989 design competition, pushed partly by French president Francois Mitterrand, and into a construction site where ground broke in 1991 just as the Berlin Wall fell. As former Eastern Bloc states applied to join the Council of Europe, the architects found their planned office space needing to grow well beyond what they had already drawn. Rogers's signature style, familiar from the Pompidou Centre, gave the building two glass drums for judges and commissioners, joined by an office wing he nicknamed the tail. Queen Elizabeth the Second planted a tree on the site in 1992, a year before the work was even finished.
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