ABSTRACT
The prosecutor's special position in continental Europe once created a struggle over furniture arrangement in the People's Republic of Poland that illustrates the problem with exceptional clarity. This chapter argues that the spatial organization of a courtroom is a sign system through which a society tries to communicate its ideal model of the relationship between judges, prosecutors, juries, and others involved in judicial proceedings. The passionate reactions to buildings of clients, designers, and users are apparently founded on the symbolic capacity of architecture rather than on its geometric or esthetic properties. Architects, of course, try to capitalize on architectural symbolism and claim proudly that their design constitutes a "statement"; designers like to say that architecture is a language, or that plans and forms can be "read" for their social meaning. Bitter conflict over the location of the prosecutor's chair has raged in Germany since the war.
