Keywords

Shaping Justice studio; Courthouse design; Visual computation; Typology; Variation

Courthouses are designed and built following prescribed rules-of-thumb that determine their programmatic requirements including accessibility, proximity, adjacency requirements and so on. This project - and its supportive formal theory (in the form of a shape grammar) - proposes a new spatial configuration that reworks the basics of the courtroom design, the core of the courthouse configuration, in terms of section to propose a new accessible to public sectional level in the courtroom, the balcony level. This new courtroom arrangement triggers a whole sequence of adjacency requirements and eventually new spatial configurations between the courtrooms and their surrounding supporting spaces that are currently not identified in the corpus of U.S. courthouses. To accommodate the new spatial configuration, a specific circulation network is proposed: A program group—courtroom and two different types of supporting spaces positioned at the opposite ends—is duplicated and rotated 180-degree to make a pair of program groups that are staggered from each other by one floor-level. This provides the opportunity to introduce ramps in between two program groups and have two continuous circulation loops that do not intersect but cross in space.