CTC Session Articles
Education Session Article
This article was written in support of a presentation given at CTC6 in 1999.
A Next Generation of Distributed Courts
By David G. Hobstetter, Todd S.Gary Phillips, Conrad L. Rushing
Overview
Emerging technologies for facilities design offer new opportunities
to develop smaller, "unbundled" and "distributed courts" that
are tied more directly to the local communities that they serve.
Such courts can achieve at least four things: 1) higher levels
of functionality and cost effectiveness, 2) improved accessibility,
3) greater security, and 4) a restored "legibility" for the justice
system in terms of scale and symbolic clarity.
Part I. Court Technologies and Facilities Design Today
The brick and mortar of the court system is on the threshold of
potentially radical change. At every scale, from individual spaces
within the courthouse to whole buildings that are linked together
in networks, the system is reaching the point where much of it
will have to be taken back to the drawing board.
Converging Dynamics
At least three sets of dynamics are converging to bring us to
this point. The first involves the steadily increasing volume
and complexity of the workload, compounded now by the simultaneous
demands for both higher security and greater accessibility. The
second dynamic involves building performance issues and new knowledge
about the art and science of putting facilities together. We know
more now about how to build a better mousetrap. The third dynamic
is the sudden influx of electronics-based technologies that are
hitting the court system at an accelerating rate.
Impact of Technology on Facilities
These court technologies are the most aggressive change agents
of all. Whether they involve case management, office automation,
court documents, evidence, testimony, legal research, or security,
it is increasingly apparent that, once inside the door, they threaten
to knock the door down.
Put another way, court technologies affect existing court facilities in at least two major ways: 1) they need to be fit, even shoe-horned, into the building and served with adequate power and 2) once installed in the building, they alter operations processes and staffing patterns to such a degree that some spaces are rendered inadequate or unnecessary, while a need for wholly new spaces can be created.
When courthouse operations and staffing patterns are changed by technology -- and the spatial and other implications of those changes are recognized -- it forces questions about future facilities design strategies that ensure a basic "fitness for purpose" by the next generation of buildings. Those changes have the effect of calling into question the viability of traditional design strategies that may lead to buildings that are functionally inadequate, not cost effective, lacking in adequate security, inaccessible, and architecturally unsuccessful.
The Courtroom
The impact upon courtroom space is reflected in current efforts
by design professionals to figure out how best to accommodate
new technologies for the presentation of evidence and argument
and for communications with others off-site. There are new infrastructure-related
questions raised by these technologies. "When we need more wire,
where does it fit? Will we need wire at all? Should we be thinking
about shielding in the walls instead of, or in conjunction with,
raised floors?" And so on. These new considerations in courtroom
design further complicate the more familiar problems of optimal
courtroom geometry, sight lines, speech intelligibility, and appropriate
imagery.
The "Back of the House"
The courtroom is only one piece of the puzzle. The flood of electronics-based
technologies into other portions of the court facility -- the
"back of the house" administrative and support spaces -- is likely
to have an equally significant impact on the way we think about
those areas in the future. For example, the proliferation of personal
productivity tools at the desktop may directly affect the size,
layout, and number of individual workstations in the area of the
clerk of the court. Will more display technology require more
horizontal work surface? Even if we replace awkward monitors with
sleek flat screens, will the overhead lighting create glare? Will
other environmental controls be designed to ensure that one's
shoulders are not too warm as one's feet are too cold? Will one
stumble over cabling that is duct-taped to the floor?
Remembering Core Values
The number and importance of the facilities design issues that
stem from court technologies are daunting, and they extend beyond
technical and aesthetic problem-solving. Depending upon how they
are employed, courtroom technologies have the capacity to enhance
or undermine the core values of the judicial process itself. More
and more, it is recognized that design decision-making about those
technologies needs to be guided by an understanding of the values
they are intended to serve.
The Situation Today
Where do we stand today? We are making progress, and several sets
of design guidelines recently have become available to assist
with the task of designing with and for technology. Nonetheless,
the success of our current attempts to address the problems in
new court design projects is mixed. We are dealing with three
generations of buildings -- a vast inventory of existing building
stock in varying conditions of adequacy -- and most of the design
work taking place today is still at the level of trying to "pull
more wire" through traditional floor plans.
We are learning, too, that the time it takes to design and construct a facility (typically five to eight years) is increasingly out of synch with the rate of technological change. There is serious lag time problem, and the volatility of the technology is such that brand new facilities risk being functionally sub-optimized, if not obsolete, as soon as their doors open. It is difficult to design a building that is intended to last at least 40 years when the technology inside changes every 18 months.
New Court Design Research Required
This new threshold for court design, then, leaves us facing an
open question. We are at the beginning of a new process that must
include a more concerted program of court design research than
has ever existed before.
Part II. Court Technologies and the Most Promising Design
Strategies for Tomorrow: "Unbundling"
As we look ahead to the next generation of courts design, we can
anticipate growing pressure to consolidate more functions under
one roof. We see it happening already. We hear arguments that
call for packing together as many things as possible. Some of
the arguments are stimulated by trends in "Integrated Justice
Systems," for example, that involve closer ties with law enforcement
and corrections; others are driven by whatever appears to be the
fastest and least expensive to construct.
Alternatives to Consolidation
However, if we pause long enough to explore seriously the design
implications of technology and the opportunities it provides for
a physically reconfigured court system, we can conclude that the
most promising design strategies involve an "unbundling" of select
courthouse functions and spaces that customarily have been grouped
under one roof.
The nature of the unbundling would vary from one type of court and site-specific condition to another, but it is only in this way that we can optimize and control without undue expense and inefficiency what the onrush of new technologies makes possible.
Key Objectives
Somewhere in the middle -- between the facilities design equivalent
of the Maginot Line and a totally virtualized meltdown of all
brick and mortar -- is an innovative and balanced approach that
seeks to achieve several objectives: 1) higher levels of functionality
and cost effectiveness, 2) greater security, 3) improved accessibility,
and 4) a restored "legibility" for the justice system in terms
of scale and symbolic clarity. Undergirding the approach is a
desire to bolster, not inadvertently subvert, the judicial process.
"Unbundling" at Different Levels
An "unbundling" strategy begins with a consideration of familiar
physical adjacencies at two different levels. The first addresses
the relationship of the court's functions to the functions of
related agencies and other occupancies that may adjoin beneath
the same roof. Typically, we see court functions combined with
spaces set aside for the public defender, the district attorney,
the probation officer, and other occupancies (e.g., a post office,
an elected official's office). The first level of unbundling would
explore ways to separate out and re-locate elsewhere these non-court
functions and, in so doing, bring back into the light of day the
"pure," unfettered court facility form as traditionally conceived.
The second level involves digging deeper. It recognizes that court technologies have broken the umbilical cord of the physical case file that has tied spaces together as it migrates through the judicial process. We are now in a position to take a second look at conventional facilities design strategies and to re-think, re-design, and carefully disaggregate, when appropriate, some functional elements that may not have to be under one roof to the same extent as before. The aim here is to improve the effectiveness of the essential court form and, ultimately, make a new, more community-responsive network of facilities possible.
A deeper look into how a court facility might be reconfigured can be pursued along the lines of distinction between 1) adjudication (e.g., core spaces for trials, hearings, prisoner handling, secure storage, and alternative dispute resolution, or ADR) 2) work processing areas (e.g., case processing, filing, updating, receiving and routing pleadings, handling payments and cashiering with filing, physical and electronic information storage) and 3) basic customer services functions (e.g., look-up activities, recording operations, probating cases).
The lines of distinction between adjudication, work processing, and customer service are not clearly demarcated in every instance, nor is an absolute separation of these functions desirable in every case. But there is considerable room for the elimination of redundancy from facility to facility, the realignment of square footage for a better fit with the work that takes place in a given area, and the streamlining of some spaces that can be supported by other, less expensive facilities off-site.
Setting the Stage for More Comprehensive Solutions
Whether unbundling is pursued at a comparatively surface level,
i.e. separating out related agencies and other occupancies, or
more deeply in terms of reconfiguring key elements of the court,
itself -- and whether it leads to campus-like ensembles of buildings
in close proximity to each other or, alternatively, to buildings
dispersed across large distances -- it sets the stage as a strategy
for the development of more comprehensive solutions to the problems
facing the system in the future.
Part III. The Emerging Opportunity: Community-Based "Distributed
Courts"
While they pose stiff challenges, court technologies also are
creating unprecedented opportunities for the development of more
efficient and effective courts that resonate with the communities
they serve. It is now possible to develop real alternatives to
excessively big and often redundant facilities -- or to the multi-tenant
government complexes in which the court system is "hidden" within
the hulking carcass of intimidating and leviathan-like buildings.
Instead of being clearly comprehensible and inviting to the citizenry
-- instead of helping little old ladies across the street -- these
facilities can loom from the sidewalk level as almost menacing
and, once inside, maze-like.
A "Distributed Courts" Network
The design alternative calls for a systemic view that looks beyond
the issues associated with a single courtroom or a single "whole
building." The emphasis is upon a network of court facilities
that are "distributed" throughout communities on a rational and
sustainable basis. A web of small-, medium-, and large-scale facilities
can be developed and deployed throughout a jurisdiction, with
the scale of each adjusted according to the size of the area it
serves and the types of cases it handles.
Smaller Court Facilities
The basic element in the distributed courts network is the smaller
courthouse of four to eight courtrooms. The facility is designed
to provide full service while being embedded more directly into
the fabric of the surrounding community.
Many court administrators and judges always have known that smaller courts are frequently the most efficient and that, as court facility size increases, there is a corresponding decrease in "throughput" rates. This has been attributed to many things, perhaps the most significant of which is that smaller courts have a shared responsibility for the workload and assist each other, whereas large courts are often departmentalized to an extent that may impede efficiency.
These smaller, technologically sophisticated and architecturally significant courthouses can be distributed throughout the jurisdiction of the court in ways that return the courts to a community setting and that repair the bonds that the people have traditionally had with their justice system buildings. These distributed courts can be located near such places as parks or in other important civic areas, and can have added benefits as catalysts for other development in some situations.
In multiethnic environments, particularly where large segments of the population may work consciously to preserve their heritages, courts that are intelligently distributed and architecturally sensitive can facilitate an acceptance of the rule of law by making it possible for those segments to see themselves reflected in a human attempt to bring justice to everyone, whatever their cultural background.
Technological Attributes
The technological attributes of distributed courts would be substantially
different from traditional ones in a number of ways, beginning
with the fact that each facility would have the infrastructure
required to operate with full connectivity and far fewer paper
files on site. The facilities would be "smarter" with respect
to the requirements of information technology, and their other
"performance" characteristics would be noticeably better than
what we typically see today. Basic building systems and features,
from air handling and uninterruptible power to lighting strategies
that recognize windows, would be more refined and integrated to
yield productive, even motivational, workplaces, reduced operations
and maintenance costs, and added flexibility for change at a later
time. A recent study of "green design" for courthouses suggests
that future facilities also will be more environmentally responsible.
The networked system as a whole would see individual court buildings connected or "tethered" both to each other and to a central data or work-processing facility located elsewhere. The centralized work-processing facility -- essentially a "programmable" storage and office space that can serve as a hub from which all of the files of the court system can be made available to each of the "distributed" courts via the Internet, an intranet, or other "backbone", and where some routine or specialized clerical functions can take place -- holds the promise of considerable savings. It can speed operations and reduce the amount of expensive square footage devoted to storage and work that can be performed in less costly buildings.
Along with enjoying improved operational efficiencies and economies, a distributed court system characterized primarily by smaller facilities can go far to reconcile the potentially competing mandates of higher physical security on the one hand, and greater physical accessibility on the other. Smaller buildings that reflect the stamp of the community in park-like settings may be easier to negotiate for the disabled and less attractive as targets to wrong-doers.
Architectural Attributes
Architectural attributes of the courts can also benefit greatly
from a distributed facilities approach. The major reductions in
scale that it is possible to achieve, and the enhanced degrees
of architectural responsiveness to issues of context that the
designer can now develop, make it possible to restore the "legibility"
and symbolic clarity of the court system. It becomes vastly easier
for the next generation of court buildings to express architecturally
their reason for being. You know what the building is all about
when you walk up to its front door.
The question of a better architecture is an endless one, and we have learned that it is much more complicated than merely replicating the iconography of the past. In an increasingly multiethnic society, where whole portions of the population have different cultural frames of reference that have nothing to do with Athens or Plymouth Rock, the Greek "Temple of Justice" or the Euro-centrism of Colonial America may no longer mean very much to many people. We need to find new architectural vocabularies that strike a balance "between memory and invention," that preserve a continuity with the past while speaking to the terms and categories of life tomorrow.
This latter issue is real and of fundamental importance. The justice system has neither the power of the purse nor that of the sword; it rests instead upon a moral plane. The facilities are therefore the physical embodiment of the rule of law. When the facilities are not equal to that responsibility in every sense, technological to architectural, the system is compromised and society loses. Fortunately, the innovative and appropriate use of court technologies can enable us to develop successful solutions as they open up a range of new design options.
Conrad L. Rushing
Contact:
Honorable Conrad L. Rushing
Santa Clara Superior Court
San Jose, California
Phone: (408) 299-7917
Fax: (408) 286-4857
Todd S. Phillips
Contact:
Todd S. Phillips
Director
AIA Center for Advanced Technology Facilities Design
Washington, DC
Phone: (202) 626-7366
Fax: (202) 626-7518
E-mail: phillipst@aiamail.aia.org
David G. Hobstetter
Contact:
David G. Hobstetter
Principal
Kaplan McLauglin Diaz Architects
San Francisco, California
Phone: (415) 398-5191
Fax: (415) 394-7158
E-mail: hobstetter@kmd-arch.com
Biographical Information
This biographical information may date from as far back as 1999. Please keep in mind that it may no longer be accurate.
David G. Hobstetter
Principal
Kaplan McLauglin Diaz Architects
San Francisco, California
Todd S.Gary Phillips
Director
AIA Center for Advanced Technology Facilities Design
Washington, DC
Conrad L. Rushing
Santa Clara Superior Court
San Jose, California