LAW FIRM & PRACTICE

Our law firm & practice stands only steps away from the Antwerp Courthouse.

A singular building, alive with images and interpretations, part of our daily horizon.

Here we offer a meditation on the ways in which architecture and law meet, collide, and echo one another.

Approach the Courthouse, and the city opens towards the Scheldt and, beyond, towards the world.

The architect inscribed within it a gesture of light and breath:

façades where daylight flows without restraint,

roofs unfurling like sails filled by the wind.

A promise of openness.

A justice no longer hidden behind closed bastions,

but visible.

Offered.

Accessible.

Yet the passer-by never sees quite the same palace.

What for some are sails – signs of freedom and voyage –

for others appear as shark fins, almost menacing silhouettes rising from a dark sea.

It is not justice itself that is revealed,

but the way architecture becomes inhabited by the collective imagination.

So it is with buildings that shelter institutions:

they carry both the first intention

and the multitude of projections of those who behold them.

As the palace wavers between lightness and weight,

so too does law move within the tension between hope and experience.

Architecture is never silent.

It speaks.

It suggests.

It unsettles.

The Courthouse becomes a metaphor of stone and glass, not a verdict.

For justice is alive, carried by many hands:

judges, lawyers, clerks, collaborators.

And above all by the trust of citizens

who come here to seek and to defend their rights.

Like Baudelaire’s albatross – majestic in the sky, awkward on deck –

this palace sways between ideal and weight.

From afar, its roofs stretch like sails toward the horizon;

up close, they turn into fins, rigid, almost threatening.

The building shares the fate of the poet-bird:

conceived to embody transparency and light,

yet always reminding us of the difficulty

of bringing the ideal into the real.

This reflection may be read as an allegory of the rule of law.

Forever in balance.

Between promise and limit.

Between aspiration and resistance.

Between openness and gravity.

The rule of law: a mirror of this palace.

Lofty yet fragile.

Transparent yet burdened.

Always becoming.