Exploring Openness of Contemporary Courthouses
(Technical report 01-2002)
by Debajyoti Pati
Abstrast
Openness, as a key political ideology, has risen to prominence in an era of massive funding into federal architecture, and heightened security concerns. Understanding its implications on state-citizen engagement, and security is, however, elusive owing to a lack of commonly understood interpretation of openness. This paper explores discourses on 18 new courthouse projects as a way to illuminate more tangible underlying concepts, and the ways in which they are translated into design strategies. Interviews with designers, and analysis of published discourses on courthouses suggest that openness is being conceived in six different ways: accessibility, transparency, exposure, organizational clarity, illumination, and inclusiveness.

Investigation into courtroom floor typologies
(Technical report 01-2003)
by Saleem Dahabreh
Abstrast
In the case of many institutional buildings, such as courthouses, program and functional requirements present fixed precepts and unwritten demands that greatly affect the spatial layout of the building and ultimately its form. Thus, one way of studying courthouses is to identify the underlying functional structures in courtroom floors that would affect the form and layout of the courthouse building through the development of an analytical typology. It is the purpose of this research to identify these functional structures that underlie the design of many contemporary courthouses, and their spatial implications, in order to discover commonalities between them and establish them as functional prototypes. The research proceeded by selecting twenty-five courtroom floors in different courthouses, and through archival and architectural analysis, the research identified underlying functional structures. The research concluded that within the analyzed sample two main functional prototypes of courtroom floors could be identified according to their geometric configuration: the central and the linear. Based on the functional structures that were found, and through applying transformation processes, a generative typology of courtroom floors can be developed. Further, the research proposed a programming terminology to accompany the generative typology.