Courthouses
The Materialisation of the Ideals and Tensions of Justice _ Herbert Wright
Society would be in big trouble without the rule of law. Justice operates over the open space of territories, but dispensing it requires an enclosure of space. Thus we have the architecture of the courthouse, also known as law courts or palace of justice. It could be argued that the relatively-overlooked courthouse typology defends us from anarchy (which has no rules), dictatorship (with its arbitrary rules) and theocracy (rules credited to supernatural power), because within such buildings, the consensual rules by which harmonious societies can function are maintained. ……
Thus, contemporary law court architecture has interesting tensions to address, between monumentality and transparency, between the universal and the local. With a context of historical examples, our survey of eight contemporary courthouses show how these tensions have evolved, while the echo of Ancient Greek ideals still echo in the architecture.
Cultural Warehouses
Cultural Warehouses and the New Industrial Paradigm _ Davide Pisu
This article depicts how different design strategies can be implemented in the conversion of an industrial building to other functions after it has ceased its activities. To this end, five contemporary post-industrial conversion projects are analyzed, and different stances are described in relation to three aspects. …… The four projects presented here offer a set of different approaches that relate to a subtler understanding of the life cycle of urban industrial complexes and their transition. These namely stem from places for the production or transformation of material goods; hence, they are organized around a logical series of repetitive activities that takes place in a rigid spatial dimension, to places of cultural consumption, social interaction and business fostering which are, in contrast, subject to extemporary actions and unstable configurations. In short, they represent the economic transition from the material to the immaterial, from the hardware —structural, strong organization— to the software —light, liquid and unstable.
