Los Angeles, CA

The courthouse occupies a prominent location in downtown Los Angeles – it engages the Civic Center, to the northwest the cultural citadel on Bunker Hill, and to the south the historic commercial core. Our design establishes an urbanistic dialogue with these three districts. The Garden Plaza is developed with landscape and water elements to create a pedestrian friendly experience – all of the spaces used by the public orient to this. The lobby and cafeteria are contained within a pavilion at the building's base. The other public spaces reside behind the curtain of glass that animates the southeast façade. Both the jury assembly room and the cafeteria can be used by other agencies for after-hours functions.

In our design the courtrooms are essential to the form and massing of the building. The courtrooms are paired allowing for shared secure services including: exhibit storage, secure vertical defendant movement, and holding rooms between each pair of courtrooms. The six courtrooms are located in a “split-level” arrangement consisting of four courtrooms located one half level above the other two. This arrangement provides distinct functional and structural advantages to the chambers that serve these courtrooms.

In typical courthouses unusable interstitial space occurs above the chambers adjoining the courtrooms. Our design resolves this inefficiency, while ensuring that all chambers occur on the same level as the courtrooms they serve. We have stacked the chambers within a tower on the northwest side of the courthouse. This arrangement facilitates collegial discourse among judges, while maintaining same floor adjacency to their courtrooms. In contrast to the maze of internal restricted corridors found in the typical courthouse, we have designed concourses for judges and staff, animated by natural light. The light filters through translucent glass set within a perforated copper sunscreen along the northwest side of the courthouse.