Michele Vitulo
ARCH 6071: f(x) Design Studio: Shaping Justice
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2017

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

The architectural core of the courthouse is imagined as a centrifugal scheme developed around the modular arrangement of courtrooms. The tripartite arrangement of this core is considered here as the most flexible one to give a single entry to the public and two adjudication spaces on each side. The area and volume of the building envelope is then the single factor to decide the number of these tripartite modules. This courthouse as a whole is conceived to inspire, to suggest and to transport, leaving to the visitor a sense of awe but also to create a compelling work environment for its inhabitants. Behind this proposal there is a strong belief that architecture, through its powerful means can and have to create a strong sense of place, a memorable image, an appealing environment, and a pedagogical gift which can deliver to the public a different meaning about the role of law in the society. The site of the courthouse at Phoenix, Arizona, brings the opportunity for a dialogue with the existing courthouse by Meier, the challenge of the local climate, and a young, multiethnic, dynamic jurisdiction on a vast territory with incredible natural beauties and Indian reservoirs. The organic architectural language of this project has been inspired in part from conics and spirals, so ubiquitous in Nature, but in particular from the Arizona geo-logical formations and its ancient architecture. The overall design process was driven by the action of carving and digging a solid, like the action of wind and water on the soil; an imitation of nature but also a metaphor of the long law’s evolutionary process expressed in architectural terms. These strong, primitive actions, simple and recognizable, are combined with the pre columbian building tradition and the Arizona nature to create a civic comfortable open space under the harsh hot climate of Phoenix. The result is a balanced tension, a manifest expression of the dialectic, proper to the realm of Law, maintaining nevertheless the formality of the urban context and an overall elegance and harmony.

Olivia Hargett
ARCH 6071: f(x) Design Studio: Shaping Justice
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2017

‍Keywords
‍Shaping Justice studio; Courthouse design; Typology; Variation; Shape grammars

The courtroom is rethought as a jewel suspended by three folds representing the three networks that hold it figuratively and literally in the air. The courtroom is framed by a two story gridiron framework mapping into the public and the restricted horizontal networks. The courtroom becomes the sight for the public, the jewel for the site and the discourse to cite as a language for judicial architecture. The new federal courthouse in Atlanta is envisioned in the gulch linking the two sides of the urban hole by becoming a building / park. Furthermore, it relates to the federal bankruptcy building next door by linking to it underneath and continues the large urban scale of downtown Atlanta. The vertical reconstitution of the polarity of the courthouse - square issue reworks the typology of the building city and suggests a new relation of the citizens to law.

Anna Preece and Clay Kinnigham
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio: Shaping Justice
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2017

‍Keywords
‍Shaping Justice studio; Courthouse design; Typology; Variation; Shape grammars

Courthouses are paradoxical buildings, at once parts of the city but also set apart from it. Previous incarnations of these buildings were unfolded in townhalls next to civic halls, market halls, performance theaters, and other public buildings. The challenges for the contemporary courthouse is to reassert its position within the urban fabric and to take on the issue of disconnect between the public and the judiciary. The design here proposes a symbolic destination for the tight-knit community that combines the program of courthouse with a cultural public program – the museum of the city. The project functions as a communal place where everyone ends up, whether for jury duty or for a visit at the crowning museum at the top of the structure. Significantly, this hybridity of spaces joining a public destination and the judicial system, resolves one of the most common courthouse design plights: the perception of the courthouse relating as a bureaucratic machine. Here this design encourages communal gatherings and accommodates for the Mardi Gras parades, a tradition established in Mobile, by allowing the parades to pass directly through the building. Spanning the length of two city blocks the design features a torqued tower of courtrooms centered above the bisecting Conception Street. Bolstering the tower are two legs on the western block occupied with a more quotidian program. The eastern lot features a public park space offering a friendly urbanity on the street and respite from the trials of court. In addition, this space features a switch-back stair-ramp and network of wheelchair access ramps to the main entrance.

John Stenzel and Sarah Tropper
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio: Shaping Justice
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2017

Keywords
Shaping Justice studio; Courthouse design; Typology; Variation; Shape grammars

Courthouses are mirrors of the values of the people and societies that make them. Past, contemporary and new courthouses reflect one-to-one this worldmaking. This project for the new courthouse in Mobile AL, takes its clues from the city of Mobile and the most emblematic of its cultural staple: the Mardi Gras parade. The architecture of Mobile, with its delicate loggias, porticoes, iron balconies and prominent green squares, is transformed on parade days to celebrate the streets of the city. The main concept for the courthouse is to embrace how the culture of Mobile captures the classic figure ground relationship of a courthouse and a public park. This idea is further pushed on, not only by bringing the park up and into our courthouse, but by bringing the street, and therefore the symbolic and literal procession of the parade through our building. The tiered landscape of the park and the public exterior areas of the courthouse become the iron porches Mobile is known for: viewing platforms for a parade that can pass in its entirety through the base of the courthouse. In this way, the ideal of a courthouse is captured as a truly public project. The circulation bridges encircle a six-story atrium that allows natural light into the courthouse and giving visual access to the procession path in the plinth below.

Ran An, Zitong Ma and Yue Zhao
ARCH 6071: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2015

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.

Quy Le
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2015

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

The language of the new courthouse morphology is inspired by the linear pathfinders extracted from urban fabrics. The resulting pattern can be meandering, undulating, spiral or nested but always clearly defined.The morphology itself may reflect the context by recording on its scaffold the prevalent urban formal conditions around it and primary paths. The new federal courthouse typology consists of a mixed-use program of federal judicial activities, public and commercial spaces, and a major public green space. The design of the new federal courthouse at Greenville, SC follows these guidelines. The site of the new courthouse, located two short blocks away from Main Street, the major circulation spine of Greenville’s downtown, invites this layered, collaged approach to literally connect the new building with the urban fabric around it. The major move here is the incorporation of the public green space in front of the courthouse in the form of urban stripes to act as a contiguous zone connecting the courthouse to the adjacent urban spaces.

Frank Gibase
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2015

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

The formal organization of the courthouse morphology is envisioned as a language of two distinct forms. A low form should house the quotidian spaces of the courthouse and an upper one should contain the honorific spaces. Clad in brick and glass, the heavy nature of the quotidian spaces below firmly anchor the courthouse into its possible site while the honorific spaces lie atop contrast to the spaces below. The skin above is the inverse of the skin below with the bricks serving as glazing and the glazing below serving as louvers. This upper skin becomes a lightweight glass beacon that reinforces the notion of a transparent judicial system and serves as an appropriate home to an “elaborate ritualism of civic ceremony” (Resnik, 2000) This language of the courthouse is set into practice here in an urban site at the heart of downtown Greenville, SC, on the edge of the central business district, adjacent to the Office and institutional district. The footprint of the new courthouse is pushed to the easternmost side of the site, opening up to the west and to the new Downtown redevelopment that has been taking place since the 1980’s. This allows for a large hardscape civic space in front of the courthouse, attracting visitors from the newly renovated pedestrian community and help reinstating the courthouse as a city’s “town hall”, as it was in 17th century America. Ideas of the collective memory of the courthouse icon as the center of a town’s communal activity are reinstated here both in the design of the public space below as well as in the in the design of the transparent spaces above to celebrate the symbolic function of justice.

Stephanie Douthitt
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2015

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

The American courthouse is a unique morphological structure as it oscilates between the two identities of the public monument and the ceremonial courthouse. It hosts both the sacred and the profane, the ritualistic proceedings and the public’s participation. The 9-Square Courthouse proposition addresses the dual identity of the American courthouse at three different scales: the scale of the city, the scale of the courthouse, and the scale of the courtroom. The nine square offers many combinatorial possibilities, but for the American courthouse, the configuration with a center void is the most intuitive. Pushing courtrooms to the building’s edges allows natural light into the well. In the Greenville case, there is still circulation about the perimeter, but this calls for a glass skin. The center void allows for everyone to circulate around a singular space, separated vertically only. This removes some of the complexity and mystery of the courthouse for the public by revealing the judge walking to his or her chambers. The vertical separation continues into the courtroom, with spectator public seated up top and active public below. Jury and public, both spectator and active, occupy two edges of the courtroom, and the resulting space, a square, is a double height space, demarcating the ceremonial space of the courtroom, the well, from other non-active, non-sacred spaces in the courtroom. The courtroom figure is demarcated from the other building spaces by orienting on a north-south grid as opposed to the site grid the rest of the building follows. The courtroom space is singled out by a rotation to true north, and the resulting spaces within one of the 9-square boundaries are programed for associated spaces, such as jury, attorney witness, and judges’ robing room.

Laura Vall Capella and Carly Smith
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2013

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

The language of the new courthouse is envisioned as a single volume dissected by multiple facades and natural light, courtyards and gardens all producing a porous instrument of light. A formal volumetric study showed that the same ratio of volume that can circumscribed by a cube, it can also be enveloped in a ring structure with double the area of facade. This ring makes the building keep the same recursive relationship from the building to the square, from the building to the courtyard, from the courtroom to the courtyard, and from the courtroom well to the spaces around the courtroom. These relationships follow the idea of the double skin formed in a tartan grid to provide the support for the main spaces of the project. The formal analysis focused on a study of built space versus empty space in a ratio of 50:100 or 1:2 and the project keeps this ratio on a 4x4 grid. A shape grammar produces all possible variations for built versus empty space through the ratio 8:16 or 1:2. Among them, the ones that kept the central four cubes as empty space were kept to suggest a main central courtyard while the organization of the other four cubes were mediated as smaller courtyards in the perimeter of the ring of the courthouse. The complete Federal courthouse for Anniston breaks down the 220K square foot program into a five-story building including all public, restricted, and secure areas as well as seven courtrooms. The building acquires a decisively urban character to relate to the character of the Noble Street to the East, the main spine of the city, and to the new proposed in the north by closing the street between the two plots and turning it into a pedestrian area. In doing so, the project avoids the secure setback and highlights the relationship between the courthouse and the square.

Philip Richardson and Anthony Rannalo
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2013

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

Historically, the courthouse exists as a pair of building and a public square. Here this historical connection has been transformed in a single gesture to simultaneously bring the public realm into the heart of the building and create a procession to celebrate the judicial institution. The main idea of the design is clearly illustrated in the section that truly foregrounds this gesture. The “profane” public space is seamlessly unified with the “sacred” courtroom level space and expands the public plaza well into the site both horizontally and vertically. Each court set exists as an independent, translucent box within the rest of the structure, yet elevated from ground level. The ramp creates a celebratory procession that culminates in a belvedere framing the mountains beyond. This designed experience is entirely accessible to the public, bridging the gap between people and government. Even the security checkpoint is moved towards the interior in order to develop an aura of transparency between public and the government. The plaza and the city-facing side of the project offers several public enhancements: to the west of the ramp, retail spaces line the façade; to the east, an additional extension cuts further into the site to frame a memorial. This gallery makes a direct connection to the historic alley adjacent to the site which was associated with the Freedom Rider’s tragedy on Greyhound Bus Lines, an infamous part of Anniston’s past. The courtroom interiors have been reorganized to enhance a new system of adjudication. The presenter is located at one end (witness or speaking attorney), while the judiciary is directly opposite (judge and jury); the two parties in debate flank the sides (defendant(s) and prosecutor(s)), angled slightly away from each other and towards the presentation. The public encompasses proceedings both at the well level and in a balcony above. All orientations support a less bias based on location rather than current courtrooms where proximity plays a large subliminal part in determining innocence.

James Park
ARCH 6012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2013

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.

Eric Goldstein and Andrew Miller
ARCH 4012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2013

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

The thesis for this design is rooted in the concept of the courthouse as the most important building type in American society. The courthouse is the location at which the government and the public have a direct interaction. The courthouse has been historically such an important building that it invariably marks the town center of early US cities, an urban location usually reserved for a church or palace in Europe. The parti for the design is the formal and symbolic logic of the tree canopy as a formal shelter, a protective canopy, a soaring detachment from earth, and a symbol for the authority of the court. The courtroom level is decidedly raised ere above the ground level to a singular honorific plane recalling the primordial settings of resolution of dispute in early societies under the canopy of old trees and the auspices of the gods.

The design for the courthouse evolves around the conceptualization of the parti as the driver of the design and the design of a shape grammar to formalize the design intentions. Here a shape grammar has been designed in the manner of an ice-ray grammar to create a spatial arrangement of the program spaces that would both recall the imagery of a tree as well as allow light to penetrate down through the layers of the building to the quotidian plane below, as if the light was coming from the honorific plane itself. The grammar also creates such an arrangement to allow all users to experience the entire building. The grammar is designed to accommodate the need for program adjacency and to satisfy a desire for many voids and irregular geometries. With the combination of the idea of separating the mundane from the extraordinary and the grammar that produces a dynamic, kinetic quality to that extraordinary plane, the design creates a bold, innovative approach to the courthouse typology that lends to an experience unlike any other civic building for all users.

Meredith James and Austin Wright
ARCH 6012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Fall 2012

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

The court has a long history based in tradition and ritual. Every culture has their own idea of what justice should be and how to execute it, but the abstract concept of justice is something that forms the basis for every community and government. It helps maintain peace and order in a world that grows rapidly more complex through time. The process of justice in a community helps maintain a balance amongst humanity, and therefore creates the courtroom as a sacred space that controls the order of society. The courthouse is meant to represent the heart and stability of the city where righteousness and integrity are held with the highest regard. Yet, the traditional vernacular of courthouse architecture can make a courthouse seem intimidating and uninviting. The garden in contrast is intended to be inviting and provide a space of peace and tranquility. The garden is seen here as the ideal perfection and beauty of nature, and in turn helps cleanse the mind and spirt. This cleansing becomes a natural transition from the hectic everyday life of the city to a sacred ritual space that embodies justice.

Irene Yim and Jack Yeh
ARCH 6032: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2012

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

This project explores a folding, continuous promenade around a series of gardens as a vehicle for the courthouse form. Within this experiential sequence, the users’ pathfinding within the courthouse becomes dynamic engaging natural light, views, and movement through a succession of staircases, ramps, and corridors. The composite circulation system is based on the interaction of the three distinct and unique circulation networks, namely, the public. restricted and secured networks and, and its form unfolds by intersecting, connecting and diverging in response to the programmatic requirements of the courthouse. The overall form of the building results as a unique calculation within a proposed shape grammar that is based on the modular character of the added courtrooms and the topological character of the interactions of the three networks. The figure of the courthouse completely covers the given site in-between the historical neighborhood of Mobile and its urban downtown. The final design proposes to bridge these two kinds of spaces, the old with the oak trees and the new austere public realm, with a new public green through the site reconnect the existing parts of the city fabric.

Woody Woodhurst and Kelly Heyer
ARCH 6032: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2012

Awards
First Prize, School of Architecture Faculty Award, College of Archicture, Georgia Tech, April 2012

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

The courthouse typology, in concert with legal constructs, has evolved throughout the history of the United States from simple, one-room structures to complex high-rises. Still, the courtroom itself remains the building's focal point. Around it, complex circulation requirements demanding constant separation of the public, the staff, the judges, and the inmates become the variables for the new building typology. A shape grammar is proposed here to tackle the complexity of the program and suggest new formal ways to envision the future of this building typology. While most analysis in this typology shows a standardized marching of units, this grammar twists the prevalent system and looks at the power of intersecting circulation paths. An initial shape (x) is proposed showcasing five nodes of placement of the intersection. Each addition of intersection types T(x) exemplifies a schema rule of the type x -> x + T(x) showcasing endless possibilities while the spaces of the courthouse, and specifically the courtrooms, emerge from the application of the rules in the grammar. Additionally, each node acts as a hinge point whereby the grammar then becomes kinetic, adding yet another layer of variation in the overall design of the circulation and ultimately the building design. Ramping the circulation pathways through central atria allows the public and staff to occupy the same space while not having any direct contact. The figure-8 circulation pattern also dematerializes the front-of-house versus back-of-house condition prevalent in the courthouse typology, allowing the judges a physical and visual proximity to those they serve in addition to allowing the public to monitor those exercising judicial authority.

Kathy Siebeda and Donny Kim
ARCH 6032: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2005

Awards
ACSA Honorable Mention, 2005

Keywords
Shaping Justice studio; Courthouse design; Typology; Shape Grammars; Landhuggers

Law and adjudication are built along a balancing apparatus of absolute and relative values. The project for a Federal courthouse at Charlotte, NC uses this polarity to propose a parti for the project organized around two spatial patterns: the one on the public front of the courthouse is structured by an unfolding series of ramps and bridges over the volume of the open lobby to foreground an itinerant perception of the public space. The second to the back, overlooking the public garden, is structured by a series of modular spaces to emphasize the discrete nature of the courtroom spaces and their support. The courthouse becomes then a completely transparent building consisting of a front sectional volumetric area for the public to occupy, an interstitial zone in-between the interior space of the courthouse and the outside city, and the sloped public garden in the back.

Paul Ehret and Amine Touati
ARCH 6012: f(x) Design Studio
Athanassios Economou, PhD
Spring 2005

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

The courthouse is set here against the typical icon of the courthouse as a figurative volume inserted in the center of a site. The design invites different ways of exploring the interface between the courthouse and the public space having spaces under the ground, spaces above the ground and spaces in-between reimagining the very idea of a public plaza in reference to the Greek agora. Here, the ground (plinth) is the interface between the public circulation on the plaza and the courthouse services under the ground. The visual interaction is introduced by several patios bringing in the necessary light to these underground offices. The mediation of light has been enabled through a series of longitudinal cuts on the plinth to produce a series of public patios. The courtrooms are rising above as formal molds out of the topographisation of the terrain, distorting, stretching, and bending the ground, and creating a spatial wave and a loop wrapping in the air the nine courtrooms of the program. This sculptural ribbon exemplifies the critical space of the interface between the state and the citizen.