Court of Justice

The gold-and-black complex at the head of the Kirchberg is the Court of Justice of the European Union — the court whose rulings bind twenty-seven countries — and it has sat in Luxembourg since the beginning. When the Coal and Steel Community was set up in 1952, its institutions were parked here provisionally, and the seven judges and two advocates general were given rooms in the Villa Vauban in the park, with the translators in one building in town and the library in another. The provisional arrangement became permanent. When the government decided to make the Kirchberg plateau the European quarter, the court was the first institution to get a building designed for it by competition.

That building is the one in the middle: a long horizontal block on the crest of the slope, opened in 1973, meant to read as a Greek temple, and clad in weathering steel as a nod to the industry that paid for the country. Three annexes followed down the slope between 1986 and 1993, named Erasmus, Thomas More and Themis, in the pink granite the banks were using at the time. Then the Paris architect Dominique Perrault took the whole thing in hand. His extension, opened in December 2008, wrapped the old temple in a two-storey ring on 116 stilts, fifteen metres out from its walls, holding the judges' chambers — the public side of justice in the middle, the deliberation around it — and gave the court its golden colour, which Perrault says is the colour of a constitutional court rather than a criminal one. Two towers for the translators came with it and a third followed; that third is the tallest building in Luxembourg: from its top, the court likes to point out, you can see Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg at once.

You can visit the hearings. They are public, and the great chamber of the old palace, where the full court sits, is where most of the decisions that shape daily life in Europe — on data, on borders, on who may work where — are handed down.