Representative Projects             Firm Profile             Contact Information

 

 


Plan showing the courthouse and the Orange Avenue Corridor down to the Indian River Lagoon.

  


A view from Fort Pierce’s planning office speculating on the form the corridor’s development might ultimately take.
 

 

The courthouse site comprises a 300’ by 300’ block, and part of an adjacent block at the southwest corner of the central business district. A portion of the street separating these blocks is to be abandoned. The program is for a 100,000 square foot federal courthouse. The program of a courthouse includes the courtrooms themselves, judicial chambers, and those agencies that prosecute, defend, house or escort defendants.

Since the Oklahoma City bombing, security setbacks for courthouses have increased to the point where it is impossible in most urban settings to match setbacks of adjacent buildings. Accordingly this building sits back from the curb, somewhere midway between two models for urban courthouses, neither holding the corner, nor sitting in the center of its own square. There is a public garden on the north side of the building, which helps to mitigate the effect of this taller building along the diminutive avenue.

There are at least two fundamental symbolic contradictions that require resolution. First, as the courtrooms themselves are

 

typically buried in the core of the upper floors, courthouses run the risk of looking like office buildings, belying their significance. Second, they are nominally public buildings but are increasingly secure, resistant to bomb blasts, and difficult to access. The courtrooms here have been placed on the upper floor where they are marked by their silhouette, and the public, multi-story glass lobby dominates the long exposure on highway 1. Secure parking has been pushed up due to the water table, so the entrance sits a full story above grade, marked by a long flight of steps and a monumental ramp. A porch delivers people under cover from the corner to the lobby entrance.

The capacity to withstand blasts requires a conservative structural design, whether this is expressed in the skin of the building or not. The relatively inexpensive masonry skin of this design transfers more blast load to the structural frame than more expensive glass walls doglass is essentially permitted to fail and absorb blast loads. The structural piers of this design are expressed in the lobby and exposed as the building wall peels back in the floors just beneath the roofs.

  
 
Previous
  
Next