Courtsweb I: A Visual Description of Federal Courthouses

Athanassios Economou (PI)

RA/URA(s): Cassie Branum, Matt Erwin, Brittany Utting, Laura Wagner, Katherine Cooper

External Consultant: Thomas Grasl

Agency/Source: GSA

Start-End Date: 09.2008 – 09.2011

Base Year / Option Year 1/ Option Year 2

2008–2011

Keywords: Courthouse typology; Visual comparisons; Adjacency diagrams; Database design

Contemporary U.S. courthouses pose unique design challenges. They have complex functional requirements and vary extensively in their size, volume, configuration, form, program and style. The courthouse design itself has received lots of attention in the past few years under the GSA Design Excellence Program, a program that has fostered a series of innovative designs to be built as well as a corresponding interest in the theoretical debate about the design of these buildings. For recent accounts of the functional and formal organization of these buildings see Phillips and Griebel (2003); Gruzen, Daskalakis and Krasnow (2006); Seale, (2006); Greene (2006); Leers (2006); Phillips (2006); USCDG (2007).

The tell-the-tale characteristic of federal courthouses is their division in three distinct, independent zones and networks that all meet at the courtrooms of the courthouse. These three zones are: a) the public zone intended for the circulation and accommodation of the general public, including attorneys, clients, witnesses and jurors; b) the restricted zone, intended for the circulation and accommodation of judges, court clerks, court employees and jurors; and c) the secure zone intended for the circulation and accommodation of the defendants in custody. The functional requirements of these three zones can be quite complex. For example, the public zone includes central public halls and waiting areas, as well as circulation corridors, staircases, elevators, restrooms, etc. The restricted zone includes jury facilities, judges’ chambers suites, court libraries, clerks’ offices, probation and pre-trial offices, court units, as well as circulation corridors, staircases, elevators, restrooms, mechanical areas, maintenance areas, storage areas, and so forth. Finally, the secure zone includes holding areas and circulation corridors, staircases, elevators and so forth. All zones include and terminate into the various courtrooms that become thus, literally and figuratively, the core of the courthouse. A definitive and detailed account of the exact functions, area requirements, and accessibility relations required for the federal courthouse is given in the U.S. Courts Design Guide (2007).

Still, while the programmatic decomposition of these buildings is thoroughly documented, currently there is no consensus on the nature and spatial characteristics of the underlying configurations that can accommodate such a complex program. A first systematic attempt for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of existing federal courthouses and for the design of new ones is provided in the current study and its associated database CourtsWeb: A Visual Description of Contemporary US Courthouses (Shape Computation Lab, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology; 2008–2011).The study includes a formal description of the existing courthouses that have been built under the aegis of the GSA Design Excellence Program and an associated database featuring fifty-four case studies. The database allows for an in-depth exploration for individual cases as well as cross comparisons among various courthouses of the corpus according to specific design criteria. All comparisons can also be represented in a variety of media including pictorial and numerical representations that can foreground diverse aspects of the courthouse, i.e. public spaces, courtroom spaces, jury rooms, judges’ chambers, attorney rooms, networks, and so forth. These representations can be produced as outputs of queries using the Compare module of the application for any subset of the courthouses in the system and for any subset of the design criteria specified.

A particularly insightful representation of CourtsWeb is the depiction of the courtroom plates of the federal courthouses in the system in terms of the conventions and language used in the U.S. Courts Design Guide (USCDG, 2007). This representation allows a seamless comparison of existing built work with the abstract language defined in the guide and therefore shows how the abstract diagram of the guide may be transformed, combined, or somehow operated upon to produce the diagrams that describe the design work. An underlying motivation for this critical comparison of the diagrams - the abstract ones of the guide and the realized ones - is to test the generative aspects of the guide and contribute thus to the foundations of a theory of courthouse design.

The application is a Java/J2EE system that resides on an Oracle database and utilizes technologies including JSP, Beans, Struts, CSS, AJAX, and Oracle WebLogic. The Oracle/JSP database has been designed entirely from scratch at the Shape Computation Lab to meet GSA standards of information technology and security requirements.

Courtsweb II: A Visual Description of Federal Courthouses

Athanassios Economou (PI)

GRA/URA(s): James Park, Ann Charleston, Laura Camp, Phillip Richardson, Eric Goldstein, Anthony Ranallo, Stephanie Douthitt, Colton Wheatley, Michelle Bunch, and Abigail Smith

External Consultant: Thomas Grasl

Agency/Source: GSA

Start-End Date: 09.2011 – 09.2013

Base Year / Option Years 1/2

2011–2013

Keywords: Courthouse typology; Visual comparisons; Adjacency diagrams; Figure ground diagrams; Database design; ShapePedia

Contemporary U.S. courthouses pose unique design challenges. They have complex functional requirements and vary extensively in their size, volume, configuration, form, program and style. The courthouse design itself has received lots of attention in the past few years under the GSA Design Excellence Program, a program that has fostered a series of innovative designs to be built as well as a corresponding interest in the theoretical debate about the design of these buildings. For recent accounts of the functional and formal organization of these buildings see Phillips and Griebel (2003); Gruzen, Daskalakis and Krasnow (2006); Seale, (2006); Greene (2006); Leers (2006); Phillips (2006); USCDG (2007).

The tell-the-tale characteristic of federal courthouses is their division in three distinct, independent zones and networks that all meet at the courtrooms of the courthouse. These three zones are: a) the public zone intended for the circulation and accommodation of the general public, including attorneys, clients, witnesses and jurors; b) the restricted zone, intended for the circulation and accommodation of judges, court clerks, court employees and jurors; and c) the secure zone intended for the circulation and accommodation of the defendants in custody. The functional requirements of these three zones can be quite complex. For example, the public zone includes central public halls and waiting areas, as well as circulation corridors, staircases, elevators, restrooms, etc. The restricted zone includes jury facilities, judges’ chambers suites, court libraries, clerks’ offices, probation and pre-trial offices, court units, as well as circulation corridors, staircases, elevators, restrooms, mechanical areas, maintenance areas, storage areas, and so forth. Finally, the secure zone includes holding areas and circulation corridors, staircases, elevators and so forth. All zones include and terminate into the various courtrooms that become thus, literally and figuratively, the core of the courthouse. A definitive and detailed account of the exact functions, area requirements, and accessibility relations required for the federal courthouse is given in the U.S. Courts Design Guide (2007).

Still, while the programmatic decomposition of these buildings is thoroughly documented, currently there is no consensus on the nature and spatial characteristics of the underlying configurations that can accommodate such a complex program. A first systematic attempt for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of existing federal courthouses and for the design of new ones is provided in the current study and its associated database CourtsWeb: A Visual Description of Contemporary US Courthouses (Shape Computation Lab, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology; 2008–2011; 2011–2013). The study includes a formal description of the existing courthouses that have been built under the aegis of the GSA Design Excellence Program and an associated database featuring fifty-four case studies. The database allows for an in-depth exploration for individual cases as well as cross comparisons among various courthouses of the corpus according to specific design criteria. All comparisons can also be represented in a variety of media including pictorial and numerical representations that can foreground diverse aspects of the courthouse, i.e. public spaces, courtroom spaces, jury rooms, judges’ chambers, attorney rooms, networks, and so forth. These representations can be produced as outputs of queries using the Compare module of the application for any subset of the courthouses in the system and for any subset of the design criteria specified.

A new set of analytical representations offered in CourtsWeb II is the production of two-dimensional figure-ground diagrams foregrounding various key functional relations in typical courtroom plates for the complete corpus of the courthouses in the system. The figure-ground diagrams have been modeled after the notation language pioneered by Giambattista Nolli in the eighteenth century to foreground public streets, squares, and public spaces within buildings from the rest of the city fabric. The complete model includes an automated and interactive juxtaposition of thirteen functional categories within the typical courtroom plate for all the courthouses in the system.

The application is a Java/J2EE system that resides on an Oracle 11g database and utilizes technologies including JSP, Beans, Struts, CSS, AJAX, and Oracle WebLogic. The Oracle/JSP database has been designed entirely from scratch at the Shape Computation Lab to meet GSA standards of information technology and security requirements.

Kindergarten Courts

Cole Loomis and Athanassios Economou
2012

Keywords: Typological descriptions; Formal analysis; Shape grammars; Courthouses; Courtrooms

The underlying morphology of contemporary courthouses depends heavily on the spatial relations between the three independent networks, namely the public, the restricted and the secure networks, and the ways they all connect to each one of the courtrooms in the building. The rising complexity is addressed here through the design of three-dimensional formal game consisting of three-dimensional blocks in the shape of rooms and corridors. The specific dimensioning of these shapes recalls the proportions of the Froebel blocks and specifically those of the oblong for the courtrooms and the pillar for the corridors to suggest a fundamental basis for the design strategy. The ways that the pillars and the oblongs relate one to another produce sectional inverted T-arrangements of courtrooms to suggest the possibility of a truly three-dimensional weaving of the networks one to another. The proposed grammar is able to capture the simple built forms of several of the courthouses in the corpus and its extension to sectional stacked corridors within the same height of the enclosed courtrooms allows for a variety of novel forms too.

Neo-modern Courtrooms

Yi He and Athanassios Economou
2012

Keywords: Typological descriptions; Formal analysis; Shape grammars; Courthouses; Courtrooms

An inquiry on the formal generation of contemporary courtrooms and courtroom-aggregations based on existing project designed by eponymous architectural firms including Morphosis Architects; Safdie architects; Richard Meier Architects; and Scogin and Elam Architects. Details about the secure network of all these courtrooms are conjectured as long as the actual data regarding these parts of the courthouses are not generally available to public. All the courtrooms are represented in an identical manner using similar conventions of wall configuration, programmatic adjacencies, entry sequences, lighting conditions and so forth. Each courtroom is captured by a grammar that can produce more courtrooms in the same language too and all grammars can be combined in a variety of ways to produce new and interesting examples of hybrid designs. Similarly, all grammars are extended to capture the ways courtrooms combine to produce courtroom aggregations, the core of courthouses, and significantly, all these grammars combine too. Two productions of the grammar– one to reproduce the original one (and verify the theory – the grammar) and another to produce a new diagrammatic representation are given for each language. The derivation of all designs is fully executed in an automated way in a shape grammar interpreter.

Courtsweb III: A Visual Description of Federal Courthouses

Athanassios Economou (PI)
GRA/URA(s): James Park, Ann Charleston, Laura Camp, Phillip Richardson, Eric Goldstein, Anthony Ranallo, Stephanie Douthitt, Colton Wheatley, Michelle Bunch, and Abigail Smith

External Consultant: Thomas Grasl

Agency/Source: GSA

Start-End Date: 09.2013 – 09.2016

Base Year / Option Years 3/4

2013–2016

Keywords: Courthouse typology; Visual Comparison; Adjacency diagrams; Figure ground diagrams; 3D volumetric models; Database design

Contemporary U.S. courthouses pose unique design challenges. They have complex functional requirements and vary extensively in their size, volume, configuration, form, program and style. The courthouse design itself has received lots of attention in the past few years under the GSA Design Excellence Program, a program that has fostered a series of innovative designs to be built as well as a corresponding interest in the theoretical debate about the design of these buildings. For recent accounts of the functional and formal organization of these buildings see Phillips and Griebel (2003); Gruzen, Daskalakis and Krasnow (2006); Seale, (2006); Greene (2006); Leers (2006); Phillips (2006); USCDG (2007).

The tell-the-tale characteristic of federal courthouses is their division in three distinct, independent zones and networks that all meet at the courtrooms of the courthouse. These three zones are: a) the public zone intended for the circulation and accommodation of the general public, including attorneys, clients, witnesses and jurors; b) the restricted zone, intended for the circulation and accommodation of judges, court clerks, court employees and jurors; and c) the secure zone intended for the circulation and accommodation of the defendants in custody. The functional requirements of these three zones can be quite complex. For example, the public zone includes central public halls and waiting areas, as well as circulation corridors, staircases, elevators, restrooms, etc. The restricted zone includes jury facilities, judges’ chambers suites, court libraries, clerks’ offices, probation and pre-trial offices, court units, as well as circulation corridors, staircases, elevators, restrooms, mechanical areas, maintenance areas, storage areas, and so forth. Finally the secure zone includes holding areas and circulation corridors, staircases, elevators and so forth. All zones include and terminate into the various courtrooms that become thus, literally and figuratively, the core of the courthouse. A definitive and detailed account of the exact functions, area requirements, and accessibility relations required for the federal courthouse is given in the U.S. Courts Design Guide (2007).

Still, while the programmatic decomposition of these buildings is thoroughly documented, currently there is no consensus on the nature and spatial characteristics of the underlying configurations that can accommodate such a complex program. A first systematic attempt for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of existing federal courthouses and for the design of new ones is provided in the current study and its associated database CourtsWeb: A Visual Description of Contemporary US Courthouses (Shape Computation Lab, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology; 2008–2011; 2011–2013). The study includes a formal description of the existing courthouses that have been built under the aegis of the GSA Design Excellence Program and an associated database featuring fifty-four case studies. The database allows for an in-depth exploration for individual cases as well as cross comparisons among various courthouses of the corpus according to specific design criteria. All comparisons can also be represented in a variety of media including pictorial and numerical representations that can foreground diverse aspects of the courthouse, i.e. public spaces, courtroom spaces, jury rooms, judges’ chambers, attorney rooms, networks, and so forth. These representations can be produced as outputs of queries using the Compare module of the application for any subset of the courthouses in the system and for any subset of the design criteria specified.

One of the most insightful representations of the courthouses offered in CourtsWeb III is the three-dimensional representation of the complete building form in terms of the two binary spatial systems modeled in the system: the honorific core of the buildings (the complete set of courtrooms and their associated spaces) and the quotidian system (the rest of the administrative and support spaces of the buildings). The honorific system is presented in detail, i.e. all courtrooms, public spaces, judges’ chambers, jury spaces, attorney/witness spaces, restricted support spaces, secure spaces with additional volumetric detail distinguishing circulation, and programmatic spaces. The quotidian space is presented in an abstract form to provide a sense of context for meaningful comparisons between the different components of the honorific system.

The application is a Java/J2EE system that resides on an Oracle 11g database and utilizes technologies including JSP, Beans, Struts, CSS, AJAX, and Oracle WebLogic. The Oracle/JSP database has been designed entirely from scratch at the Shape Computation Lab to meet GSA standards of information technology and security requirements.