Celebrating the Courthouse
A Guide for Architects, Their Clients, and the Public

Steven Flanders, Editor

Praise for Celebrating the Courthouse:

“[I]lluminates, for the diverse professionals and laypeople who plan and create courthouses, the issues that must be addressed to achieve an effective and satisfying building.”—Listed Heritage

Overview – Contents – Review – Index

 

“Both in function and in design, the buildings architects design will embody and reflect principles that tell the public who use or see them something about themselves, their government, and their nation. In so doing, those buildings can help us live together better as a community. Indeed, the story that a building tells through its design may be as important to the community it serves as is its function.”
—From the Foreword by Justice Stephen G. Breyer

There are almost as many ways to design a good courthouse as one that is less than satisfactory. Celebrating the Courthouse illuminates, for the diverse professionals and laypeople who plan and create courthouses, the issues that must be addressed to achieve an effective and satisfying building.

This book unites the skills and experience of architects, judges, administrators, and lawyer-users to guide the design of a complex building type. No attempt is made to prescribe a particular program for any model courthouse project. We live in too diverse a design world for that: courthouse programs are specific and distinct from one another. Rather, the distinguished contributors lay out a variety of solutions that can help solve the problems confronted in particular settings. Considering historical precedent, context, functional requirements, and public and client needs, they focus on the best practices in design and also upon some design failures, addressing the pitfalls presented by courthouse programs, which are among the most complex that architects face. Finally, they look at the technological revolution and the future of courthouse design.

Celebrating the Courthouse is a repository of practical experience and wisdom that will help those who come to a courthouse project without much (if any) previous experience: county commissioners and others with funding responsibility, citizens’ groups and bar associations with a direct interest in finding a satisfactory solution to the practical needs of the courts, and architects newly drawn into what was once a minor subspecialty of their profession—to learn quickly what opportunities and special problems are presented by a courthouse project.

About the Editor

Editor Steven Flanders, a consultant and author based in Pelham, New York, is the author of numerous studies concerning judicial administration in the United States and many other countries. He served as circuit executive for the Second Judicial Circuit of the United States and, previously, on the research staff of the Federal Judicial Center. He is the coeditor of Cass Gilbert: Life and Work.

ISBN 10: 0-393-73070-0
ISBN 13: 978-0-393-73070-8
Octpber 2006
200 illustrations / 30 color / 320 pages / Cloth