REPRESENTATIONS OF JUSTICE
A Photographic Essay
in Two Parts
PART
2-
The
Design of the Commonwealth Law Courts Building, Melbourne
Paul Katsieris
Design Architect, HASSELL
Return to Part One-Introduction- The Hon M E J Black
AC
With the possible exception of churches, cathedrals,
and temples, few types of building other than law courts better embody
pure architecture.
A society looks to a law court, as well as
other public buildings, to personify the community's state of being with
respect to matters of justice. The institution is expected to uphold
the law; to demonstrate a certain purity; and to manifest a symbolic
weight or an anchorage in an increasingly virtual and dissolving public
realm. `Purity' in this charged context is seen as a necessary
pre-condition justifying the power vested in, and yielded by, the
institution.
In a court of law, systems of political structure,
social order, individual rights and collective rights merge and
intermingle with an almost spiritual intensity. This spiritual sense was
well reflected in the court buildings of the nineteenth century whose
soaring, centralised, naturally lit domes yielded quasi-religious
atmospheres and spaces that seemed to symbolically appeal to the heavens
for wisdom. A feeling of the presence of a higher order was invoked,
bathing the affairs of the mortals below in the light of divine scrutiny
and conferring to the proceedings the gravities of ritual.
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Concordantly, it is no accident that one of the most important
public rooms in contemporary Australian life is the crisp volume
containing some twenty metres of sunlit space directly over the judicial
bench of the Number One Court in the High Court of Australia in Canberra.
Here, open space, a huge volume of contained oxygen in the Number One
Court and in the axially set processional ramps of the public foyers
metaphorically signals visibility, transparency, openness, intellectual
deliberation, accessibility, freedom, and illumination. Specific
religious associations are eschewed but spirit is maintained. ‘Spirit’
as a reflection of a monotheistic divine order has been transplanted
architecturally by spirit recalled as an invocation of place. In this
judicial context, the heroic scales and spaces of Australia's landscape
mythologies are drawn into and held in suspension by Colin Maddigan's
master interior. The architecture of the High Court in Canberra, which
represents the moment when judicial buildings in this country attained
their contemporary voice, was the springboard for our own deliberations
on the architecture of the Commonwealth Law Courts in Melbourne.
Genre
The law court typology‘s themes of public ideals, public realities,
civic governance, and individual and collective rights, mingle with an
eternal analysis of human and corporate conduct under law. The richness
of these inter-woven themes, well understood by film-makers, allows the
courtroom drama its own eloquent genre within film culture: a genre in
which the architecture itself often figures powerfully as one of the
characters. Interestingly, the modern courtroom is almost never depicted
in these elements of popular culture. The preference is for ornate,
neo-colonial or neoclassical expressions of the architecture enveloping
the crucible of the drama. Occasionally, one spies a lonely lap top on
the far corner of the bar table.
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In contrast, we would like
to review that form of modernism best described as `mid-century downtown
corporate', as an interrupted rather than an ended discourse. On the
one hand, this form of modernism is derided as a dinosaur from a
fossilised age of utopias, brotherhoods, universal truths, or, on the
other hand, practised as a mild sedative. 
Clean,
minimal, light, reductive, with a surface gloss often attempting to
mimic Zen tranquillity. Caught between these narrow binaries, modernism
as genre is left to oscillate in irrelevance as an exhausted paradigm
from a lost age or a sparse interlude bathed in chic
meditation.
Entasis and Curtain Wall
In this project, an attempt was made to work with
mass, weight, gravity and the almost disappeared paradigm of entasis.
Entasis refers simply to the local swelling of classical columns and
related elements such that they appear, through a trick of visual
perception, to be perfectly straight in their outline profile. Long
considered an ancient irrelevancy, it has disappeared as a domain worthy
of any critical architectural inquiry. We have attempted to understand
entasis as a condition less to do with optical refinement and more to do
with the manipulation of static wall forms such that they appear to
exhibit tension, straining, or movement about to be: a curtain wall
poised between static and plastic aesthetic states.
Embroideries
tapestries, weavings, test-patterns, colour-cards, and similar
two-dimensional patterns. Spatial power is not necessarily diminished
through the adherence to a two-dimensional framework. The woven figure
represents great freedom of expression but within an overall framework
regulated by the limitations of the loom. To our way of thinking, the
facades of the law courts are an exercise in weaving. In terms of
composition, the aim is to manipulate the elements of a curtain wall and
establish a series of rhythms and counter-rhythms, alignments and
misalignments, at all times holding the eye of the viewer, and drawing
the viewer deeper into the world of surface dilations, expansions,
contractions. Order and disorder coexist in tension. Aesthetically, one
does not subsume the other. We believe that it is precisely in this
tension where the architecture is suspended between two contradictory
states, that a certain fertile moment occurs and the pictorial
experience may crossover into a momentary sublime. In this way, we hope
to allude to perpetual growth, and perpetual freedom. Interior
This is a building which one can
look into as much as one can look out. The work of the courts, the
public coming and going, and the administrators in their offices are all
open to the urban realm. The main gallery, nine storeys high and
stretching the length of a city block is the signature of the interior.
Tall and thin, it is compressed to create an axial throw to the
North-West, the interior of the country. It is our hope that this
gallery space suggests an agreeable grandeur and poise through its
scale. Elements of smaller scale, following our themes of tapestries and
woven elements, are distributed within the rise of this compressed
volume: the warmth of timber veneers, the interest of random colour
blocks at low levels in tune with people‘s height, and the provision of
smaller, almost intimate elements within the architecture inviting
touch, action and interaction. These include drinking fountains, writing
places, telephone bays, gathering points for people to cluster around,
and long, wide concourses running the length of a city block for those
seeking some kind of solitude to amble up and down to relieve
anxiety.
Finally, the building has a fine tracery laid over it. A building of
words, in this case the words that form the language that is the law are
printed, literally, onto the glazed portions of the facade.
When sunlight strikes in the city, and as one walks
within the building close to the perimeter, the shadows of the words
that form Chapter Three of the Constitution fall across one's body.
Words are ever-present as a metaphor for the law that is also
ever-present both inside and outside this building.
Return to Part One-Introduction- The Hon M E J Black
AC
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