ABSTRACT
One of the most iconic and concrete encounters one can have with international law is to visit its institutional buildings. Buildings make law physical and visible. International institutional buildings have become icons that embody international law’s aesthetics, values, and histories. With legal sightseeing, we see architecture in terms of how international law becomes tangible for its audience and constituency. You can actually touch a building of an international institution, visit it, and sometimes even access it. In this chapter, we open up on this physical encounter between international law and its public. In particular, we argue that the façade of an institutional building can function as ‘business card’ of sorts, presenting a first introduction of the building’s resident institution. More specifically, we take institutional architecture as a lens through which to look at the ambivalent aspirations of international organisations, as concretely reflected by the architectural design of the ICC in The Hague and the EU in Brussels. To this end, the chapter provides a ‘legal sightseeing’ tour through the architectural landscapes of these two ‘legal capitals’ and explores the concrete materiality embodied in their architecture through discussing the representation of values and needs, embeddedness within the city, and audience expectations. By comparing the two sites, we aim to shed light on the shared dynamics that characterise the encounter situated in an internationalised city. In that sense, this chapter focuses on how a building enters into ‘conversation’ with its visitors and city of residence, notably through its façade.]
