JUNE 2007 » book review

Constructing Justice

Celebrating the Courthouse: A Guide for Architects, Their Clients, and the Public
Edited by Steven Flanders
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2006
240 pp; hardcover; 20 color and 200 b&w illustrations.; $60
ISBN 978-0-393-73070-8

Reviewed by Nicole V. Gagné

Author Steven Flanders was clearly the ideal choice to edit Celebrating the Courthouse: A Guide for Architects, Their Clients, and the Public. A respected writer on judicial administration in the United States, Flanders was also the co-editor of Cass Gilbert: Life and Work (W.W. Norton, 2001), which examined the career of the architect who designed the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, and the Woolworth Building in New York City. For his new study, Flanders has gathered contributions from an impressive array of experts in the fields of both American legal practice and the architecture of courthouses. Whether viewed as a history, a philosophical text, or even a how-to guide, this book is an unqualified success.

Celebrating the Courthouse is divided into four main sections that cover the areas of principle concern in courthouse design and usage. Part One, "Placing the Courthouse in Its Community and History," begins with a valuable overview from architectural historian William Seale that traces the evolution of American courthouses as a distinct, vernacular architectural genre. Seale notes how even the simple "boxes, cubes, or rectangles" of late-18th and early-19th-century courthouse design managed to distinguish themselves from other box-shaped buildings through their reliance upon an isolated site as well as their inclusion of an all-important cupola, "announcing the official purpose of the building and, more abstractly, the overall power and security of life brought by the law."

This literalizing of philosophical meaning through architecture became an increasingly important consideration in the elaborate buildings of the late-19th and 20th centuries, and has continued to dominate design schemes – an approach described by architect Frank Greene in the second essay in Part One, which documents Modernist approaches in recent courthouses. Along with ADA accessibility and urban siting, Greene emphasizes the role of "transparency," with glass walls serving as "a defining metaphor of a critical need in gaining public trust in the judicial system."

Part Two, "Solving the Distinctive Problems of a Courthouse Project," provides a survey of geometric themes in courthouse design by architects Jordan Gruzen, Cathy Daskalakis and Peter Krasnow. Their account covers such familiar patterns as the centralized four-courtroom layout (popular for small courthouses) and the open-ended, expandable linear approach that features floor plates with multiple courtrooms, along with radial and clustered designs and other innovations.

Architect Andrea Leers contributes to this section a thoughtful examination of the interdependence of courthouse design and urban setting. She explores a spectrum of possibilities, with the courthouse serving as a unifier of an unfinished cityscape; as infill for more inflexible urban layouts; as an adaptation to a dominant site feature such as a waterfront or highway; and as a vitalizing addition to a marginalized city district. Architect Paul Spencer Byard concludes Part Two with an overview of changing concepts of justice in the 19th and 20th centuries and their impact upon architectural design. His essay pays special tribute to two imaginative structures: H.H. Richardson's Romanesque Revival Allegheny County Courthouse (1888) in Pittsburgh, PA, with its arched bridge that copies the famed Venetian Bridge of Sighs and connects the back of the courthouse to the jailhouse across the street; and Pei Cobb Freed's Boston Federal Courthouse (1998), which not just overlooks Boston Harbor but also embraces it with its monumental pair of brick wings set at a right angle.

In Part Three, "The Courthouse, Its Politics and Its Users," U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock provides an essential account of how the architecture of courthouses in the past was derived from the design of their courtrooms. Judge Woodlock also describes the current proliferation of courtrooms (and all their ancillary support spaces) within a single building, which has blunted the traditional effect of celebrating the public's entry into a ceremonial arena of justice. The theme of his article is expanded by lawyer George A. Davidson, who offers a down-to-earth examination of fundamental considerations in courtroom design, such as size, sightlines, traffic circulation and supporting facilities (including storage and cafeterias), all of which define the functionality of the entire courthouse. Editor Steven Flanders also lends to this section his own guidelines for how the full design team of a courthouse can work together to unify the numerous considerations that their specialized tasks require.

The complex demands of 21st-century jurisprudence are the focus of Part Four, "The Future of the Courthouse." Fredric I. Lederer, chancellor professor of law at the College of William and Mary, describes the ever-expanding role of technology in the contemporary courtroom, from audio-visual devices for displaying evidence and speech-recognition computers that aid the transcription of testimonies to the incorporation of television cameras and microphones to document proceedings. Architect Todd S. Phillips closes this section by analyzing the failure of many older courthouses to adapt to the growing demands placed on them and offering new possibilities for the future evolution of courthouse design. Steven Flanders' choice of a subtitle for Celebrating the Courthouse was most apt. He has indeed contributed an indispensable guidebook, not just for architects and judicial agencies, but also for anyone fascinated by the design choices and the philosophies of law that have shaped the construction of these essential buildings. TB

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