The aim of juridical architecture, the architecture of courts, prisons, and anything else that aspires to correct the crooked timber of humanity, has traditionally been to overawe all who enter, both evil-doers and decent citizens alike.

But awe in general has ceased to be one of the options available to our culture, and neither modernism nor what followed it has shown much interest in revisiting the stern and majestic authority of earlier correctional facilities. If anything, an attempt has been made to mitigate the severity of such structures by admitting more light, airing out the interior spaces, and arraying the walls in pastel colors that have been known to have a pacifying effect on human beings.

Like most of its modernist forebears, the new Bronx Hall of Justice, designed by Raphael Viñoly, seeks to humanize our interaction with the forces of law. Something in the very materiality of the glass and steel that make up most of this building at 265 E. 161st St. seems to militate against the Gothic severity of masonry and brick. At the same time, though, the boxy massiveness of the structure and its apparently unapologetic embrace of bigness succeed in intimidating this viewer scarcely less than the Tower of London, the Palais de Justice in Brussels, or even Alcatraz itself. Containing 1.1 million square feet, the Bronx Hall of Justice, when fully operational in early 2007, will house some 62 courts and a garage that can accommodate more than 300 cars.

The dominant idiom of its greenish-glass structure is modernist, once again unapologetically so, in keeping with the revival of this idiom in recent years. In that regard it stands in marked contrast to César Pelli’s Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, which opened last year to vaguely art deco designs concocted in the early 1990s. Whereas Mr. Pelli’s building had masonry cladding and rose as a slab upon a base, Mr. Viñoly’s 10-story Hall of Justice stretches across its entire block (from Sherman to Grant Avenues, two blocks west of Grand Concourse and three blocks west of Yankee Stadium) in an endlessly repetitive and modular horizontal mass.

Nevertheless, it is hardly a monotonous building, thanks to various formal devices that vary the visual texture of the façade. For example, much of its surface is corrugated with an angled sequence of windows that achieve especial emphasis at the corners of the building. Toward the center of the structure, at the entrance, this riddled pattern suddenly resolves itself into elements of a curtain wall. This wall surmounts the long, cantilevered marquee of the entrance way, which bears the name of the building in elegant art moderne lettering. At this point, I can confidently assert that such lettering is part of the architectural vocabulary of the Bronx, since, in the past year alone, it has shown up on Richard Dattner’s new Bronx Library at 310 East Kingsbridge Road and Arquitectonica’s Bronx Museum of the Arts, at 1040 Grand Concourse.

From 161st Street, which is how most people will approach and enter the site, the broad, squat Hall of Justice reads like a monolith. But the punch line, evident as you walk around the building to its northern side, is that it is not the perfect rectangle it appears to be, but rather a carved-out shell, roughly L-shaped. To the north and east it opens up as a huge public space that, even when seen in winter and in a state of partial completion, promises to be one of the more eminent landscaping successes of the newly revived borough of the Bronx.

There is an almost brutalist aggression in the irregular massing of the corners of the building’s northern front, as well as a deconstructivist zeal in exhibiting the glazed external stairways. In one corner of this vast space, connecting it to the building itself, is a sprawling, windowless, and cylindrical drum that makes odd visual sense. Its elegant limestone forms an arcane architectural jest, one that, I think, will have been lost upon the magistrates who had to approve it. For in form and spirit it recalls nothing so much as the exuberant rationalism of such late 18th-century Enlightenment architects as Boullée and Ledoux, who devoted themselves largely to public works, not least to prisons. Specifically, the grand drum puts one in mind of such carceral structures as the infamous panopticon, conceived by Jeremy Bentham and much discussed by Michel Foucault in his book “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” (1977). Despite Bentham’s rationalist ambitions, a whiff of the rack and the knout lingers about his project — at least among readers of Foucault — and that seems to be slyly alluded to by the architect, but in ways that may well be lost on the magistrates of the Bronx.

However that may be, this cylindrical structure turns out to be the main receiving room for potential jurors. Seen from the inside, it is bright and airy, with wood paneling and cushioned seats designed to make the prospect of jury duty as pleasant and anxiety-free as possible. If it fails in that respect, that says more about jury duty than about the architecture.

As you exit this jury room, you are confronted by a soaring atrium that makes up most of the public interior of the building. With two-tone terrazzo floors, this space is pleasant enough. But in the tangle of floors and stairways overhead, it seems to have slipped ever so slightly out of Mr. Viñoly’s control, making for a less harmonious experience than the building affords in other respects. That said, the structure as a whole is indeed Architecture with a capital “A,” and that fact in itself represents considerable progress over comparable projects in New York only a generation ago.

jgardner@nysun.com