Preliminary procedures to the reuse of the seats of justice: parallelism France-Italy

The French Ministry of Justice has launched a little over a decade, an operation of alienation of its extensive judiciary heritage. What is striking is the intended use allocated to these abandoned buildings. The most unusual case of atypical reuse is definitely one of the court of Nantes, recently transformed into a luxury hotel. While some of the architectural features of the judicial type have been betrayed, the quality of the operation has been properly controlled through extensive preliminary studies. A decade ago, a hypothesis of similar transformation has been proposed for the Courthouse in Milan (built by Piacentini), because of the project to transfer the courts to the district of “Porto di Mare”. But in this case, it seems that the new use – a great hotel – wasn’t the result of a thorough analysis of the possible enhancements of the building. The paper aims to reflect on the cases of disposal and atypical reuse of court buildings and on the procedures adopted by public authorities to identify the most appropriate ways of enhancing.