Hello – I am honored to be attending the AAJ Architecture for Social Justice Conference this week as a 2014 Scholar. It is my first AAJ conference and I was interested in attending because several of the topics are aligned with my recent research as part of the Shape Computation Lab at Georgia Tech. Our work has primarily been focused on a collaboration with the General Services Administration to develop CourtsWeb: A Research Database of Federal Courthouses. The aim of this project is to capture the intricate relationships involved in the complex layers of these buildings through documentation, analysis and comparison with a larger ambition to evaluate present design solutions to promote thoughtful civic architecture aligned with the goals of the Design Excellence Program. Our most recent case study is one of the 2014 Justice Facilities Review awarded projects, the San Diego US Courthouse Annex by Richard Meier and Partners Architects. If you are working on a courthouse project in any capacity and are unfamiliar with our work, come talk to us at the conference for more information.
Participating in this research has allowed me to build and contribute to a body of knowledge that has engaged my interest in the courthouse as a building type. This summer we began a parallel project to develop a historical lineage of the courthouse and our aim is to use that and our accumulated knowledge from CourtsWeb as a basis to project future possibilities for the building type. This work has also been part of the preparation for one of the presentations at the conference this week, “Designing the Democratic Courtroom,” lead by Chief Magistrate Judge Celeste Bremer and Dr. Thanos Economou, who leads our work at the Shape Computation Lab. Interestingly enough, our presentation highlights three courthouses that you can actually see while we are in St. Louis including the Old Courthouse and Civil Courts Building (both pictured above with Saarinen’s Arch) as well as the Thomas F. Eagleton US Courthouse by HOK. If you are interested in hearing more about these buildings and others that have contributed to the history and logic of court design, don’t miss the opportunity to wake up early and join us for our session this Thursday November 6th at 8am!
I will also be posting additional content related to the conference here on the AIA KnowledgeNet blog … so keep a look out and I look forward to meeting this week in St. Louis.