Awards

Finalist, CriticalMASS Competition, UNC Charlotte School of Architecture, Apr 7, 2016

Keywords

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

The federal judiciary of the United States is one of the three co-equal branches of the Federal government of the United States organized under the United States Constitution and laws of the federal government. The challenge for the design of the new courthouses is to find the appropriate architectural language to express democratic ideas and a literal and metaphorical transparency that can be perceived and appreciated by the public, the judiciary and the defendants, the three constituent groups that use this building type.

The design of the new federal courthouse in Mobile, Alabama, provides a unique opportunity to test the new idea of this architectural expressive and transparent language that serves the overall vision while taking its clues from the specificities of the site and the wider region. The key driver here are two: the lifting of the whole building up so the site on the street level can be used for public activities and connect to the public parks on both north and south side of the community; and the cladding of the building in a symbolic architectural language that uses the formal motifs of the bayou in the southwest, to propose a building as a work of art that blends architecture with art and provides a unique new center in the city. The immense canopy above is generously perforated to let line through as in a bayou while the courtrooms are delineated as transparent modules to look back to the community and blur the boundary between public and courthouse.