Shape Computation Lab

The Dirksen Variations

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01. Formal analysis of a typical courtroom plate of the Dirksen Courthouse: a) Polygon representation; b) Dual graph representation; and c) Ad quadratum diagram.

02.The set of 36 two-dimensional diagrammatic representations of the postulated Miesian courtroom plate design variations from the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

03. Rule 16 of the Dirksen grammar presented in four types of representation: a) a sketch of the three-dimensional parametric shape rule in axonometric projection; b) a graph representation of the sketch; c) a script encoding the graph representation; and d) a two-dimensional representation of the rule.

04. Stage 2 of the Dirksen grammar: Courtrooms. Rules 7-20.

05. Stage 3 of the Dirksen grammar: Scaffold. Rules 21-36.

06. Stage 6 of the Dirksen grammar: Section. Rules 71-77.

07. A sample derivation of a Miesian courthouse design from the software implementation of the Dirksen grammar in GRAPE: the final design of Dirksen Courthouse.

08. Six sectional models of Miesian courthouse designs all satisfying the requirement of having 24 courtrooms and the appropriate volume of public, office and support spaces: a) the final design of Dirksen courthouse; b) the design variation 4-09 in the corpus; c) the design variation 1-05 in the corpus; d) a hypothetical design with two courtrooms per courtroom plate; e) a hypothetical design with three courtrooms per courtroom plate; and f) a hypothetical design with four courtrooms per courtroom plate.

James Park and Athanassios Economou

2018

Keywords: Mies van der Rohe, Courthouse design, Generative description, Shape grammar, Ring schema

The ring typology provides the most essential morphological characteristic of all contemporary courthouses in the United States (US) and abroad. From its genesis at Waterhouse’s revolutionary rethinking of the courthouse building type in the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom to its formal consolidation in Mies Van der Rohe’s pristine Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse (Dirksen Courthouse) in the early 1960s in the US, the ring has emerged as the most significant morphological element that organizes the functions and defines the form of the building type. The work presented here takes on the architectonic arrangement of the ring especially as it was deployed generatively over several iterations in the office of Mies producing a seemingly inexhaustible variations of courtroom plate. A generative description of Mies’s courthouse design language is presented in the form of a three-dimensional parametric shape grammar and its significance in the discourse of courthouse building type is discussed.