In the sixties there was some coherence in the planning of the Commissioners’ Estate as a whole, with a garden court surrounded by a great hemicycle of terracotta arcading by M. D. Wyatt lying behind the 1862 Exhibition Building and below the Albert Hall. In Vienna the cultural edifices were admirably grouped along the Ringstrasse with plenty of open space between them, however much they may have lacked intrinsic architectural quality. In sad contrast is the way the following decades allowed this considerable tract to become clogged up until almost no urbanistic organization at all remains. Other European countries tended in this period, like Denmark, Sweden, and Holland, to follow Paris and Vienna rather than London. Only a few works of the sixties and seventies need be singled out from the welter of pretentious public and private construction that turned Brussels, for example, into a ‘Little Paris’.[209] The Boulevard Anspach as a whole suggests the Cannebière in Marseilles, although the mansards on the buildings that line it are more plastically handled; the Exchange, in its own square half-way down the boulevard, was built by L.-P. Suys (1823-87) in 1868-73, and this provides the focus of the mid-nineteenth-century city, as does Garnier’s Opéra in Paris. A provincial variant of the Opéra in many ways, despite its quite different function, this is somewhat more academic in composition yet also rather coarser in its profuse ornamentation. Brussels as a whole is dominated, however, by one of the grandest and most original monuments erected anywhere in this period. The Palace of Justice,[210] built by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79) in 1866-83, occupies so high a site and is mounted on so mountainous a substructure that almost the whole of its gargantuan mass is visible from all over the city. Although generically Classical, a good deal of the external treatment has an indefinable flavour of the monuments of the ancient civilizations of the East, somewhat like that of the exotic churches Alexander Thomson built in the late fifties and sixties in Glasgow (Plate 81). Even more than Thomson’s relatively small and delicately scaled work, the Palace of Justice also suggests the megalomaniac architectural dreams of such a Romantic English painter as John Martin. Heavy and almost literally cruel, it has a Piranesian spatial elaboration and a plastic vitality of the most exaggeratedly architectonic order. Thus it quite puts to shame the urbane Renaissance costuming of most Continental public architecture of this period and the usual Neo-Baroque of the next.