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Above: Map of Ft. Pierce region showing the site, the Indian River Lagoon, the barrier islands, and the Atlantic.

Right: Map of central business district, showing courthouse site.

  
 
 
Ft. Pierce Courthouse
 
 

The Government Services Administration undertakes to build courthouses for the federal courts. The GSA’s design excellence program has produced a federal courthouse initiative in recent years that has demonstrated both the invention and the programmatic discipline that building typologies afford designers.

The southern district of the Florida courts required an adjunct courthouse to address metastasizing Sun Belt population growth in its northern most counties. Fort Pierce is a small city with a downtown that has retrenched and attenuated since the Second World War. The post war development for which most south Florida cities were unprepared has largely by-passed the central business district for either the barrier island or the damp pine and palmetto woods in the western part of the county, leaving the center of Ft. Pierce town under built but reasonably intact.

Modest wooden bungalows at the fringe of the downtown

 

survive from the years following the arrival of Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railroad. Mediterranean buildings survive from the years of the Florida land boom, and small, astringent moderne buildings survive from the interwar years. The city’s recent centennial has left a period of modest renewal in its wake, even as intractable problems remain.

The site for the courthouse is the corner of U.S. Highway 1 and Orange Avenue, the principal intersection of the city. Highway 1 is a traffic corridor that has not figured prominently in the pattern of the development of the downtown. Orange Avenue, a viable pedestrian street, starts across the state, comes through cattle land and the grapefruit groves, through a gateway of storefront churches and missions just west of the site, and ends at the Indian River Lagoon just east of the site. Surrounding buildings are twenty to twenty five feet tall. The courthouse will be about seventy feet high. Many of the considerations in designing and siting the building have revolved around addressing the divergent requirements of these two principal streets.

  
 
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