Graduate studio work with Professor Andrew Zago at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture

 

While the prison is a space of incarceration where guilty individuals reside, the courthouse is a space of judgement, where a body of people discern a verdict to free or imprison an individual. More than ten million people around the world are currently held in some form of penal institution. The U.S. ranks first in incarceration rates, and at the end of 2012, the prison population was 1,571,013. With this inflation of imprisonment, the courthouse occupies a critical position in the sentencing of each prisoner. In the courtroom, police, prisoners, jury, judges, lawyers, witnesses, and spectators all meet in the same space. The courtroom is the site where all of these different sets of relations converge. Each of these subjects require different spaces and circulations, resulting in a labyrinthine building of rooms and pathways under a variety of public, secure, and restricted access.

 

SOM’s LA Courthouse, currently under construction, is an image of efficiency. It reflects the municipal ascetics of our current neoliberal economy seeping into the justice system. This project, the work presented here, attempts to reflect the contemporary labyrinthine space of the justice system, and the inflated incarceration rates it digests. Rather than a “strong civic presence”, this project pursues a contemporary urban object. Rather than “optimizing workflow and promoting efficient operations”, it contrives interior walls to create configurations accommodating any programmatic combination.  Rather than innovative structural concepts involving floating cubes and tension, it folds thick volumes into chucky, clunky, hulking figures in compression. This project is not an image of what the justice system wants to be, it is an image of what it is: a complex digestive system of crimes, arrests, prosecutions, dismissals, appearances, hearings, offenses, releases, charges, waivers, misdemeanors, hearings, diversions, felonies, information, processes, pretrial services, adjudications, arraignments, trials, acquittals, pleas of guilt, dispositions, sentences, sanctions, corrections, probations, revocations, paroles, corpus’s, clemencies, punishments, and power. The juridical involution of this complex system is resolved through the formal involution of interior and exterior space.