New Palace of Justice, Florence
Leonardo Ricci · Florence, Italy · 2012
Florence's new Palace of Justice is a vast judicial complex derived from designs by Leonardo Ricci and completed long after his death. The building is organized as an angular megastructure of concrete volumes, bridges, towers and public routes, giving courts and offices a deliberately forceful civic presence. Its scale and fragmented silhouette contrast with the compact historic center and instead address the infrastructure landscape of Novoli. The project belongs to the lineage of late twentieth-century Italian brutalism even though construction extended into the twenty-first century. The completion year records the opening of the realized complex; the relationship between Ricci's original concept and later execution merits editorial qualification.