Seth McDowell Architect, pllc

Why is the courthouse so dreadful? The US courthouse is an iconic, complex, and contested institution of adjudication that organizes a space for individuals to interact with the governing authority - spatializing the Sixth Amendment and the rights possessed by those accused of crimes. It is also a structure clouded by painful experiences especially for the marginalized who often see going to court as entering the “door of despair.” For many people around the world, courthouses symbolize the power of law to enforce the oppressions of colonialism and of racial and gender hierarchies. Security concerns and spatial segregation between public spaces and controlled spaces have turned courthouses into glorified bunkers. In this studio the goal is to rethink this civic typology and propose new spatial models for architecture that enable a better democratic experience and access to justice for all members of the body politic.

Lives are dramatically altered by the work conducted within court buildings. In the last 30 years the civic space for adjudication has exploded from a courthouse anchoring a city’s center to a sprawling judicial complex often pushed to the city’s peripheral. State and Federal design guidelines encouraging neoclassical iconography of law and order, strict security protocols, and bloated administrative needs have rendered the US courthouse an architecture of anguish. These modern court complexes often present a corporate sterility rivaling hospitals or office parks. In a moment when truth and justice dominate public discourse the architecture of the courthouse needs to find ways to become less intimidating, more humanistic, and more accessible.

How can we flip the courthouse from an architecture of despair to an architecture of repair? The goal in this studio is to reconfigure the judicial space and its interface with the city so that the future vitality of courthouses, with their public adjudication and recent efforts at egalitarian redistributive practices, is assured. While courts may be monumental in ambition and often in physical girth, their durability as active sites of public exchange before independent jurists should not be taken for granted. “Like other venerable institutions developed in the eighteenth century, such as the postal service and the press, which serve in parallel fashion to disseminate information and to support democratic competency, courts are vulnerable.” In this studio we will investigate architectural techniques for transparency, structural ordering, porosity, public access, passages, separation, and material honesty as methods for materializing truth and justice in constructed environments.

Many, if not all, of Virginia’s more populated cities and counties have replaced their aging courthouses (Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Arlington, Fairfax) with expansive court complexes. Many of the Commonwealth’s rural jurisdictions still occupy aging facilities that are overcrowded and lack the essential features of a modern, efficient court building. The rural county courthouse is the next target for the expanding judicial enterprise and the same space needs formulas are being applied to these communities to encourage more sad, sterile complexes for judgement.

The location for the studio’s investigation is 40 miles west of Campbell Hall in the City of Staunton, Virginia. Known as the Shenandoah Valley’s Queen City, Staunton is a small city of approximately 25,000 that is physically characterized by steep topography and an eclectic architectural heritage. Since 1901 Staunton has served as the home to the Augusta County Courthouse, however for over a decade the facilities have been inadequate and in violation of Virginia law. This has led to many feasibility studies, schematic designs, and disputes between the county, the city, the historic preservation commission, and the public about how to build a new courthouse in the city. Unfortunately, in the last year voters and officials have made the decision to push both the County Courthouse and the Juvenile & Domestic Relations District Court House out of the city’s historic center to lower costs, minimize disruption, and enable unbracketed growth. The premise of this studio is to challenge this decision as it further removes the courthouse from the people and exacerbates problems of access to government. We will aim to demonstrate that there is still a place in the city for democracy and justice. Students will choose to develop a project on one of three site options within Staunton’s historic downtown district.