ABSTRACT
At a 2009 conference the architect Stephen Quinlan delivered a plenary lecture on the recently built and much discussed Civil Justice centre in Manchester. This new court complex is the largest to have been built in England since the Royal Courts of Justice were completed in 1882. The postmodern glass-fronted Manchester Court complex with its nine-storey atrium and gravity-defying protruding ‘fi ngers’ could not provide a more stark contrast to George Edmund Street’s ornate gothic revival building in the Strand. But what was most signifi cant about Quinlan’s presentation for present purposes was that the fi rst comment in response to it came from an architectural historian in the audience who was concerned that the new Manchester centre was not recognisable as a courthouse. Devoid of the form, signs and symbols which we associate with this established building type, he claimed that England’s most important new court building served to render the notion of ‘courthouse’ meaningless. The idea that courts are, and should be, instantly recognisable is not a controversial one. Whilst recognising the variety of forms adopted by designers, Graham (2004) surmises in her authoritative account of the history of the English law court until 1914 that one of the key characteristics of modern courthouses is that their planning is ‘highly distinctive’ (p.1), indeed ‘fossilized’ (p.3). In their recent review of historic English courts for English Heritage Brodie et al (unpublished) have also claimed that law courts are designed to be recognised externally and understood internally. The most recent edition of the Court Standards and Design Guide (Her Majesty’s Courts Service 2010) is equally confi dent about the existence of a template when prescribing design models:
[C]ourtroom layouts . . . are the result of careful consideration by numerous user groups. They incorporate specifi c and well-defi ned relationships between the various participants by means of carefully arranged sight-lines, distances and levels. It has been found that attempts by individual designers to improve on these layouts have rarely been successful and consequently these layouts (including accompanying levels) are to be adopted in all cases. (p. 7: 1.2)
In this chapter, I argue that these assertions suggest a certainty about the settled nature of design which is easily disrupted when subjected to closer scrutiny. While the Court Design Guide suggests that our ideas about what constitute a court are now quite fi xed my analysis suggests that the concept of a courthouse to which they allude is actually a very recent invention. In-depth research suggests that the history of spaces dedicated to community or state-sanctioned forms of adjudication is a long one in which a wide array of spatial confi gurations have been designated suitable for the administration of justice. One approach to such diversity has been to arrange courts into historical clusters, each of which constitutes a ‘development’ on the last. Girouard’s (1990) four-part chronology of the development of the modern courthouse is an example of such an approach and Graham’s (2004) monograph largely presents a more detailed account of his typology. What the former lacks and the latter can often only hint at given its scope is the history of ideas which underpin shifts in design. I argue that these otherwise informative accounts tend to treat certain ideas about courthouse design as being synonymous with particular periods. While this approach has many merits, it could be suggested that what is most interesting about histories of courthouse design is the ebb and fl ow of ideas about legal space.
