Intro to Complexity

by caroothers

Moving forward with the idea of physical lines as a solution to the courtset construction, the program has begun to develop.  The program within this form mimics the overall form of the building, very linear.  With overhead planes which create implied spaces throughout the building, these linear programmatic elements are able to be pushed and pulled to create moments and develop an interaction between them. The ribbons have established a set of rules and created programmatic reference within themselves.  Some begin to become solid barriers, while others attempt to disappear in the light. The building form becomes an icon through its form.  It needs its own set of design rules that must begin to form in the program of the building.

1. Each court room will be made of 3 ribbons/lines, separating the courtroom into three distinct spaces.
2. The separation of the court rooms will be a ‘solid’ ribbon or a ‘void’ ribbon.  Solid ribbons house the court holding areas for the judicially challenged and void ribbons serve as circulation light wells.  this relationship further distinguishes the dark/light solid/void pattern that is developing in as a metaphor for the building.
3. Public circulation will be perpendicular to the ribbons through the interior of the building, weaving through the columns.  (there has got to be another metaphor here for ‘weaving’ circulation).
4. Private circulation will be perpendicular to the ribbons through the exterior of the building, weaving through ribbons.
5. The judge’s chambers will be at the exterior moment of this ribbon to allow for potential views to the exterior and a connection to the community which they serve.
6. Each ribbon will consist of more than one program, however, the programs within the ribbons will be related.  e.g. the courtroom ribbons will house the courtrooms, as well as offices for the people who work in the room.  The Solid ribbons will serve as a utility function and a security function.  Since the judicially challenged people of the court are (in this humble writer’s opinion) a commodity of the court a utility that passes through the courthouse.  This ribbon will be the holding cells, vertical circulation for those people, restrooms, and storage.

The lines themselves become a program specific element that can be defined for a specific use throughout the building.

Entry

by cchlebda

Around fall break, I started to think about how to delineate an entry sequence for the courthouse. Up to this point, I had been drawing the lobby as a large space without any program, doors, or other articulation worked into it. Because I want my flex space to be a publicly accessible cafe (visitors wouldn’t have to go through security), the cafe and its various support spaces would be located in the lobby. The issue I faced was how to make an entry space with a kitchen, restrooms, and dining area in the lobby along with security screening stations and queuing areas, as well as vertical circulation for the courthouse. I looked at the walls I had been drawing as dividers between a secure atrium and the cafe in my previous plan iterations, and I realized that the “poche” of these walls could be thickened to contain the service spaces of the lobby/cafe (kitchen, restrooms,  circulation). The thickness of these “walls” turned spaces also created a human scale threshold to tuck the security screening station into, so that it wasn’t the first obvious thing a user would see upon entering the courthouse or cafe.

First Floor plan with articulated entry/atrium spaces

Entry/Approach sketches

As I worked on the lobby space, I continued to refine and develop the rest of the courthouse as well. I reexamined the courtroom in section and thought about how people in the alternate dispute resolution spaces (public) could start to see into the courtrooms from above. Likewise, I continued to develop the building form, refining the curvature of the roof and ceilings of the courthouse spaces.

Section through courtroom with view from ADR

Sketches – Judge’s bench in elevation, Roof form

Plan Diagrams

by JP Mays

These are the two typical plans of the upper floors of my design.  The courtrooms are double height, with restrooms stacked over the conference rooms below.  A main circulation zone runs between them, with an angled stair that punctures the facade as it increases in height, and two public elevators.  The in-custody elevator only serves one half of the courtrooms, so any criminal cases would need to be heard in those four.  There is also only one jury deliberation room per floor, which I now recognize is opposite that of the criminal courtrooms.  I will need resolve that issue as I refine these layouts.

 

Breaking Barriers

by cchlebda

As I mentioned in my last post, some design concerns I took away  from Mecklenberg County Courthouse included introducing natural light without glare (so the shades aren’t perpetually drawn) and creating a kind of side space for observers to “sneak out” of the courtroom without disturbing others. With these and other issues in mind, I reexamined my courtset design.

Model of Courtset with Vertical Fins

I began by breaking each courtroom’s side walls, which are adjacent to courtyards. Originally, I had introduced the courtyards in order to bring daylight and outdoor views to the “interior” jury deliberation spaces. Therefore, when I started to open the side walls of the courtrooms, I used a series of angled, vertical fins to block views from the courtroom into the jury room and vice versa. Using fins also allowed me to introduce softened, reflected light into the courtroom, rather than the kind of direct light that was constantly shut out of Mecklenberg County Courthouse. After modeling this scheme, I realized that  changing the location of the glass envelope in realtion to these fins also presented an opportunity to create a visual barrier between spectator seating and side entry aisles, preventing people from causing too much of a disruption as they come and go during court proceedings.

Courtroom with Side Entry Aisles

In addition to reevaluating my courtsets this week, I have begun to look at how the jury assembly spaces and circulation might fit into the overall building layout. I find the duality of the jury’s position in court to be of particular interest. That is, the jury must always be a simultaneously public and private entity. The jury must be public in the sense that its members, constitutionally, are the “peers” of the defendant and private in the sense that the jury cannot come into contact with the judge, defense, prosecution, or any other party that might try to influence their decision, resulting in a mistrial.

With this duality in mind, I have positioned the jury assembly spaces in the kind of residual floor level that exists “in-between” the courtroom levels. I have designed my courtrooms in section to be double-height on the south, public side and curve down to single-height on the north, private side. The “in-between” space where I have decided to place the jury is literally sandwiched by judges’ and staff’s single-height spaces (on the courtroom levels) in section and adjacent to the courtrooms above and below in plan. The jury itself is an intersection of public and private, and by positioning the jury in this residual, “in-between” space, I’ve  discovered another spatial way to intertwine public and private in the courthouse as a whole.

Jury Assembly and ADR sandwiched between private levels

Program Diagrams

by JP Mays

I have been focusing on relationships of program, circulation, and site. At the entry one passes through security and into a large lobby with access to services, child waiting, and the career center.  A central circulation core pierces up from the main level, gesturing towards uptown and the center city skyline.  An atrium connects all floors, providing a visual and aural connection to each level.  Separating the courtroom volumes creates an intermediate exterior terrace space, with views to the city center and also the nearby community.  The courthouses are stacked and staggered, each with their corresponding judge’s chambers, and shared jury deliberation between them.

Variance in privacy and promoting walkability

by workbymichelletodd

For the design of my courthouse, my approach has been different than my typical strategy. Instead of working in plan first, I worked in 3D form through modeling. Now that I have decided on a massing that seemed aesthetic and capture the essence of my idea, I have moved onto plan. Working in a reverse order from what I am used to has posed its challenges considering I want to remain as true as possible to the form I have developed, but because of programmatic reasons, the design is shifting slightly. While working with the programmatic spaces, I am trying to sort out the spaces by privacy. The greater the privacy needs, the higher the floor. To help carry the idea of walkability from the future urban plan into my courthouse, I am also trying to key in on the circulation of my building. With the introduction of a entrance volume that projects into the public realm of the sidewalk, passer-bys can be lured into the building, where they can access a kitchen that will provide jobs to the people who live around the courthouse. This kitchen will provide a space that allows people to interact with the building even if they are not there for legal purposes.

In these diagrams, the orange objects are courtrooms, the light blue spaces are jury deliberation rooms, the red is the circulation column, the yellow are the judge’s chambers, the light grey are support spaces and the dark blue is the kitchen. The image on the far right is a composite of all of the plans.

by pdgaither

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Over the past week one of the ideas I have been focusing on is putting my building in the site and how it should react with the immediate context and how it will reach out to the overall community. I will focus next on the development of the corner, and investigate how to make the court more inviting while also developing a connection with the flux space I am dealing with in my design and the community at large.

by pdgaither

This past Wednesday I attended the Charlotte Mecklenburg county courthouse. Getting there was a journey within itself. I probably drove around the blocks surrounding the courthouse at least twice before finding parking deck that was still a several minute walk from the courthouse itself. Upon arrival, I went into the building through a side entrance. I say side entrance because the main entrance is at the corner of the building. I entered the building and suddenly was at security. It was not implemented within the design of the building and was very close to the entrance. As a side note, when I was leaving, exiting the same way I entered, there were several people in line and the line extended out the door. Granted the exterior portion outside of the door was covered, I do not think that people should have to wait outside just to get into a building. Especially a building where in most cases they are trying to put something behind them and move on with that part of there lives.

The first set of cases that I witnessed were in criminal court. It was a very fast paced event. There was much more activity going on than I thought there would ever be. The observation area was almost completely full. There were lawyers sitting where the jury would be located in a jury trial, waiting for there case or cases, I assume. The criminal defense lawyer represented three or four people one after the other. I was not aware that this happened. She, the lawyer, had a rather large stack of folders in front of her and every time another person would come out of criminal holding, she would just take another folder off the stack and quickly familiarize herself with it. Although most all of the cases were for probation violation, that is still a lot of case work to go through.

I then visited family court. It was on the top level of the court which made sense due to most of the matters going on there would be of more of the personal type. There were paintings on the walls and places to sit outside of the courtrooms. With all of this false sense of security for the children I still felt very uncomfortable inside of that courtroom. It was the only trial that I saw witnesses called, and I thought that it was interesting, but just to think that a family was being separated right there in front of me was in many ways very unsettling. The father was representing himself and the mother had a lawyer. The kids were not not there but people from both sides were called out of the observation/seating area to state and claim how good the respective parents were to and with the kids. Overall, being in there was a good learning experience but I won’t be going back.

The final courtroom I visited was the civil court where at the time the judge was dealing with matters of broken leases and money that was due to the landlords or owners of the property. This was very fast paced. The judge would swear the people in, take a quick look at the lease, find out the amount owed, and just like that it was over almost before it started. There was very little debate from the people being charged. It was as if they new what they owed, but they just wanted to drag it out as long as possible before they had to give up their money.

Court was and wasn’t what I expected it to be. Obviously there was no high drama or enthusiastic questioning, that would have been mentioned, but as I had hoped, justice was being served and people were having ‘their day in court.’ With all that happens in the world around us it is good to know that at the heart of the judicial system, people are doing what they can to make things right. As one last side note, I unfortunately never saw or heard a gavel.

To Curve or Not

by fcahill

This week I moved from the courtroom set and delved into the program and looked at how to work the circulation of the private (judge), the public (us), and the in-custody defendant.  I began the week with a tower approach but as I understood the program more and how I wanted the circulation to work it morphed into more of a bar design.  Through sketches and models I began to work with the necessary space-relationships to see how the ideas of open and continuous movement worked/didn’t work through my models and sketches.

These begin look at the paired courtset plan from last week’s model.

The courtset begins to look at private v public and the spatial relationship between 2 courtrooms.

The paired courtrooms try to focus on ‘movement’ and a separation of private v public.

A separation of private and public is reached but is there still the idea of ‘movement’ present?

What’s Behind That Door?

by fcahill

My court visit started with difficulty.  I’m not sure if it is something inherent in cities and their one-way streets, but it was quite difficult to figure where I needed to go to get to the courthouse; I kept ‘just’ missing it due to one way streets and ‘no turns.’  I ended up parking next to the bus depot, which gave me a good idea of how people who would need to use public transportation would get to the courthouse.  Once I was finally past the security, it just a matter of deciding which court to start with.  This proved harder and easier than I expected.  Easier because I was able to walk into whichever courtroom I wanted, but harder because, even though to docket was posted outside each door, I had no idea what to expect on the other side of the door.  The first time,  going into criminal court, I was relieved to find myself in a buffer area where I had to go though another door to get into the actual courtroom.  The doors themselves were very imposing; extra-wide and pretty heavy, it definitely made an impression as I made my way into each courtroom.

The first court I visited was criminal court.  This was the most busy of the courts I visited, with people walking in and out on the both the private and ‘in-custody’ circulation sides.  The courtroom was mostly square, with the door ‘in-custody’ defendants used at a slight angle away from the public, and facing the judge.  This court was quite overwhelming as my first courtroom on a number of levels: the public benches were mostly full so I had to look to find a place before sitting, there were many attorneys sitting around waiting for their case to come before the judge (I was initially thrown off because some were sitting in the jury box), the typing of the court clerk was quite loud and constant as case after case was being presented, and finally I had major difficulty understanding the judge and hearing whoever was speaking from the counselors’  tables as they were facing away from the public, standing (because the cases were being moved through so quickly), and not speaking into the microphones.  Along with that, people were moving in and out on the public side, talking, and someone’s phone even went off-the bailiff just asked him to step outside.

On the opposite end of the criminal court was the family courtroom.  The procession up to it was quite different and gave an overall different feel before I even stepped into the courtroom.  I had to go to the top floor of the courthouse and when I stepped onto the floor it was much quieter   There was carpet in the main hall/circulation that kept things quiet, there were fewer people milling about, there were benches along some of the walls that allowed for someone to sit and not be seen and there was artwork on the walls.  While it was quieter, it was not unwelcoming.  The images and paint colors on the walls were fun to look at and interesting, but there was still that sense of “what’s behind the door?” that felt more consequential due to it being family court and knowing that emotions were potentially running high on the other side of the door.  The case I saw was a very low key case, but very interesting as the father was self-representing while the mother had a lawyer.  They were figuring out child custody and I got to see witnesses being questioned by both the father and the mother’s lawyer: it was very interesting to see how each did it differently and how, as the father kept leading the witnesses with his questions, the lawyer kept asking the judge to stop him.  It was very interesting to the see how we got different pictures of the witnesses by how they were questioned and what picture was formed by the type and direction of the questions.  This courtroom was octagonal so the public was more ‘involved’ in the case just by line of sight and because the witnesses were being called from the public seating.

Finally, I visited a civil courtroom-muuuuuch smaller (even the ceiling was lower)-and watched proceedings for renter’s who broke their lease agreement.  This was interesting because the judge had a lot of attitude and seemed quite brusque, but at the same time, when a young man had been unable to pay his rent due to outside issues and his landlord still would not take his rent, she gave him advice and hope (which was more moving as she had been very removed from all the other cases).

All in all it was a very interesting day, it changed my romantic ideas of court and reaffirmed some others but one thing that really stood out was the use of daylight inthe courtroom-or lack of it.  Each courtroom I visited had a pretty large window that either looked outside or in the case of the civil court which was on the lower level, the blinds were pulled and most people probably didn’t even notice it.  It gave the courtroom a timeless feel as we had no idea where the sun was, but as a designer, I was just very disheartened and disappointed.