The Courthouse as a Bastion Against Terror

by Jane Holtz Kay

Civility, urbanity, grandeur without arrogance. If public architecture was civic art raised to the pinnacle of dignity, then the calling of the courthouse was to infuse that art with access and democracy. Judge, jury and suspect alike entered it. Everyday citizens passed by it. And, though set on a lofty eminence in the town or a commanding spot in the city, the courthouse knew how to soften its role as Temple of Justice to fit into the public realm.

A decade ago, all these messianic notions stood high on the list of the nation's builders, the General Services Administration (GSA), when it undertook its most ambitious architecture project since the New Deal. The agency's courthouse program sought to create a benign federal policy on the landscape. By enlisting well-regarded architects, by pledging to reinforce city centers, the GSA would erect some l60 courthouses with civic aims and architectural excellence.

This fall, Boston's new $228-million federal courthouse, the most noted of the program's initial offerings, opened along the waterfront in a city hospitable to both goals: urbanity and quality. Under the aegis of one Supreme Court Justice, Stephen G. Breyer, and one federal jurist, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock; taken from the drafting board of a prominent architect, Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the waterfront building would embody the GSA's architectural and public access values.

And, a few less eternal ones. For, another trinity--the demand for space, security and technology--was also high on the program. And these last three, as much as democracy and aesthetics, had defined the project and moved it through congressional approval. The desire for space, the need to wire the legal world for the computer age, and, especially, the urge to make it secure from, first, criminals and, later, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, terrorists, accompanied the aim for "Design Excellence."

Funds-follow-function is, one might suspect, a more honored axiom than the noble form-follows-function. And so the need--or the perceived need--to safeguard judges from prisoners passing too close for comfort in crowded quarters dominated the agenda. (To this day, elevators and corridors sound like shooting galleries when builders talk.) Thus was established the space-consuming plan for plural paths of circulation--and an inevitably Us-vs-Them architecture. Add the need to repair and update standardbearing buildings, plus judicial egos, and you understand the 8 billion dollars allotted to these forensic Mt. Olympuses. builders

The stranger looking at Boston's brick chevron-shaped courthouse on its 4.5 acre seaside site might not see all this. The nuts-and-bolts business of security are not exactly imprinted in its long walls. But the bigness and independence of city restraints is inherent in the program's guidelines is apparent. "Imposing," one observer offers uneasily, assessing Cobb's looming ark on its isolated Fan Pier site.

Overwhelming structures are scarcely novel in America. Nor is the intimidation of five whitehaired security officers in blue blazers standing at the courthouse entry when I visit (one at the front desk; one walking, cell phone in hand, around the entrance; three manning the metal detectors and ushering me through three passes at its wood-framed gate). We live in a security industrial complex these days.

But the GSA's call for "Design Excellence" provokes a deeper look. And that look reveals that decisions in planning and placement, in construction and design, made from afar and administered on site by self-confident judges dictated a downright anti-social attitude.

In the first place, the location of the courthouse on the water's edge in Boston's still unplanned Seaport district caused and causes consternation. Federal builders, here as elsewhere, have the ultimate say over community desires, local zoning and planning. Claiming this prominent space without review or local say-so was a risk--a bad risk here, and a big risk in all government buildings where the federal presence is writ large.

In the second place, the relocation of the city's old courthouse from its landmark Post Office Square building amidst downtown's core of shops and services to this speculator's wasteland of wraparound parking was equally distressing. Whatever the area's future, the move negated the GSA's true commitment to a thriving central business district.

"Respect" figured in an opening day address, in public programs and in worker's names etched in the stone walls. But the true "respect" of public access is less noticeable. The judges secured such deference, as well as parking places. But jurors, attorneys, staff members and the public have no garaging, nor, more important, no access to good public transportation on land or sea. Instead of the eating/shopping services of a neighborhood, they got a cafeteria and a lot less convenience.

In short, "democracy" didn't quite trickle down. For how could it when the move itself--to new quarters, distant quarters--denied walkability and connection, the very core of urbanity? Despite claims that the court will spur development in the Seaport area, its blank wall to the street and remove can hardly inspire citiness for this waterfront Tomorrowland.

Cobb's building itself gets mixed reviews. Landside, the monotonous, brick exterior, punctuated by arches at either end, provokes the classic question: "where is the entry." No "all-ye-who-enter-here" assurance to arrival here. Inside, the reception and check-in areas offer awkward forms in choice materials. More positively, the nine-story rotunda that centers the courthouse is graceful and well-lit. Its well accommodates l2 surprisingly lifeless Ellsworth Kelly paintings in solid rainbow colors. (The blue one, my guide tells me, represents the merging of the races in Boston. Merging? Blue?)

The water side of the building opens out more generously, fronted by a lawn and open spaces landscaped by Laurie Olin and bordered by a promenade linking to the city's splendid public HarborWalk. Its seven-story curving glass wall tilts vertiginously towards the harbor, though its rather heavy steel structure still allows fine views from the interior balconies and function space.

The setting remains a problem here, too: as Cobb's facade dims into a dark mass from afar, it becomes an intrusive wall marring the inner harbor, the city's finest bay, and confining the outlook to the sea. The building's grim stance has prompted the staple joke: "The courthouse has the best view in town...you can't see the building from it." A sad epigram, indeed.

Is it imperatives need barricade idiosyncratic or programmatic across the nation? pompousity

Unfortunately, this very visible courthouse in the GSA program is not the only evidence of public promise undone by an emphasis on judicial vs. civic pride of place here, and defensive impulses in America's design for industrial strength surveillance. The architecture of paranoia is pervasive, from gated communities to fortified post office entries to Mayor Giuliani's city hall turned into an armed pullback zone.

For decades, federal buildings like the Federal Reserve have been bulwarked with berms and removed from the street as if the Goths would dash across the moat. The nation's anti-terrorist overkill of barricades and mechanical frisking make the local passport or other federal, state and local offices feel like airports fending off Hollywood's Men in Black.

Unfortunately, the GSA has contracted and spread the infection. Its adoption of this security-firstism gives the lie to the loftier (and pricier) values espoused by the agency's chief architect and courthouse enthusiast Ed Feiner.* Scan the dozen projects he highlights. Whether it is architectural ambivalence or indifference, the results are disappointing. Few, if none, achieve the excellence sought or blend and enhance the city center. Most raise the question as to whether there can be urban design excellence and access in so fortified and regal an approach.

Admittedly, many federal courts are jammed and rundown. Security makes it claims and money should go here and there. But, at these prices for space and protection, you could dress the judges in rhinestone-spattered titanium robes, swathe the prisoners in vermeil chains, and--let us pause here--support drug re-hab programs, parole officers, gun-control or, as others have noted, re-consider the mandatory drug program that overloads the system.

And, by the way: Remember renovation, re-cycling, and add-ons? The courthouse program manager, Bill Guerin* says he has no tally of the additions versus new construction. But judges with edifice complexes as big as the Ritz mostly opt for new buildings. "Functionally obsolete," one architecture firm describes an old courthouse. Did dated technology make Congress find new quarters or a president vacate the White House?

A few new buildings are wings, annexes or entrances to old ones. Though the new Foley Square courthouse highrise in New York City by Kohn Pedersen and Fox (KPF), lacks distinction despite its luxurious interior, it reinforces the complex. So, too, does architect Peter Bohlin's sprightly connector merging two existing buildings in Scranton and Leonard Parker's compatible addition in Fargo, North Dakota.

Nationally, though, the preferred mode remains a fresh-start structure; the preferred design boasts an exterior grandeur emphasizing size vs. context, aloofness vs. neighborliness. Gary P. Haney of SOM points out the problems of surplus girth for his neoclassical Charleston, West Virginia, courthouse. Although they "tried to make it as non-intrusive as possible," says Haney, "the layout of floors, the isolation, the circulation" made the courthouse the king of the mount in that capitol. impulses

So it is elsewhere in many of the initial l8 buildings. Courthouses like KPF's in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis; Ellerbe Becket's in Kansas City and others are often overscaled and detached from their surroundings, denying connection and covering its absence under the misnomer, an "anchor for development." In the setback structure in Santa Ana or the out-of-town location of Oakland's courthouse at a government complex site, the GSA's mandate for downtown connection seems more honored in the breach.

Stylistically, the urge for awe, if not intimidation, often produces an august, or Augustian, architecture that adds pomposity to the problem. Architects and judges looking to tradition share one dominant vocabulary: the neoclassical. That image, established in l933 when the Supreme Court moved out of the basement and into architect Cass Gilbert's imperial building, has filtered into the national imagination. But the pomp and circumstance is harder to handle now.

How do you make a building oldie but not Disney as post-modernism becomes passe? The historicist courthouses in the GSA selections on my desk display enough classical salt-and-pepper columns to season McDonald's daily quota of french fries. Even the modern idiom of the forthcoming ones by Cesar Pelli in Brooklyn, Richard Meier in Long Island, and others earn criticism for ostentatious size and placement.

No one denies it is a tough call to create sanctity without pomposity, to combine security with urban connectivity. In a culture of fear and isolation, ambivalence is understandable. Notwithstanding all these quagmires, what the judicial core of clients and architects need most of all is to invoke their hallowed precedence: to restore the noble and civic attitudes of the past as the courthouse puts on new robes.

This article appeared in the New York Times, January 3, l999

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