The Bryant Park Community lies in the shadow of the ‘New City’ of Charlotte. The Site calls for the rise of a new neighborhood from the trash of the remaining community. Like the city of Charlotte, Bryant Park will connect to the past by rising above it and create a new active district hub. From the shadow of the new city to a beacon of the new south.
My exploration of the courthouse typology has taken me into an investigation of how community and law overlap. This stemmed from my initial research into Sentencing Circles and Restorative Justice, or the practice of allowing the community to attach a remedy or sentence for the crime committed. The principle behind this was to create a bridge that would allow for rehabilitation and re-admittance back into the community as opposed to the typical separation that exists in most courtroom proceedings.
I also researched an interesting precedent at the Superior Court in Portola, California that utilized strong vernacular architecture to blend the surrounding community and culture together with the establishment of law and order. It uses the vernacular materials and building design to create a synthesis with the surrounding landscape and culture.
This led me to focus my site research on the vernacular of the local site where the courthouse will be located. Specifically, I looked at site materials and the evolution of site typography. The connection between the physical (courthouse) and the written (law) is paramount in the formation of the legal system. If the courthouse was to be grounded in the community and of the community, I needed to understand the use of both materials and words within the community. I needed to understand how to weave the two together seamlessly.
With this site analysis, I looked at how the site was experienced by different modes of transportation: car, bike, and walking. I started by looking at how one can arrive at the site with current access roads as well as looking at the proposed area changes of the Bryant Park Development (BPD) as current and accessible.
I first looked at the roads that surround our immediate site for pedestrian, bike and car access and broke it down from most to least accessible for pedestrians and cyclists. This also included the Greenway as a way that would provide access to the site (which BPD proposed) as an additional way that cyclists and pedestrians could access easily from surround areas.Charlotte has also implemented a bike-share for the city and I located the bike stations, the roads with bike lanes and roads that should have bike lanes in the uptown and surrounding area. The two closest bus routes that would bring people to the site are the Airport Bus Route and the Freedom Drive Bus Route which 7 days of the week.
At this point, I went and visited the site and experimented with how a building and site are seen when driving, bicycling or walking past. For each pass, I noted the distance, the speed and the time it took me to get from point A to point B. I used the Charlotte School of Law along Suttle Drive as a my test building. While driving I noticed much less of what was surrounding me, especially because the building in question was close to the road whereas when I was walking I noticed not only the building but it’s surroundings, the views from all directions and how much I hoped there was shade along the way.
The forms of (and relationships between) physical and/or psychological thresholds and processions within any courthouse experience led me to explore the physical thresholds encountered during a procession through our site. My original site section in pencil and gauche on clayboard (Freedom Drive to Wilkinson Blvd looking East) was transformed through the layering of images collected traversing the site and the separation of the site section into segments creating a physical space corresponding existing thresholds on the site (ie: Stewart Creek, W.Morehead Street, wooded areas, parking lots, etc.).
As I began to investigate our site, I wanted to understand the human fabric of the neighborhood of which our site is a part, Ashley Park. I researched census and other demographic data, but wanted to translate that in a visual way. I started by making a network of the main streets, defined by two wooden bars representing the four-lane roads Freedom Drive and Wilkinson Boulevard, to the north and south respectively, with wire and jute for the intermediary streets. The amount of the colored paper was based on the percentage of the particular demographic info; for example, 67% of the area of the neighborhood is in dark green, representing the percentage of the African American population. Woven perpendicular to the colors are the black and white strips, which represent 15.8% unemployment and 20% below the poverty level, respectively. The unwoven regions are the predominantly industrial or commercial areas.
My site analysis is a study of specific demographics at the site and the immediate surrounding context. The categories are as follows (clockwise from the top): Median House Income/Median House or Condo Value, Most Common Industries, Transportation, Year House were Built, Most Common Occupations, & Class of Workers.
I studied these demographics in particular because I believe they can relate to the design of a new modern public courthouse. Each of the categories has influence on others, which allows them to relate and play off of each other and influence the design of my courthouse.
[space + justice] 