Le Corbu and the Law
Karlsruhe, a synecdoche for Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, has recently caught the attention of the Twitterati as well as LawSpring’s previous contributor. Alongside the highest courts in Johannesburg and Jerusalem, Karlsruhe often features in writing about legal architecture. According to Karlsruhe’s architect, its glass panelled façade, framed by balconies, is intended to express democratic transparency following Germany’s zero hour (Stunde Null), and to distinguish the building from the 19th-century style palaces of justice.
We should look at courthouses as cultural icons, which can be used to map shifts in ideology; and not just the highest courts of the land, but also those much closer to home and everyday. The mundane as well as the magnificent has its attractions — for example, those English court buildings constructed roughly 1960–80, including Manchester Crown Courts (1962), Milton Court (1959) — a now-demolished part of the Barbican and tribute to Le Corbusier’s Indian Villa Shodhan — and Doncaster Magistrates’ Court (1974).
From a black letter lawyer’s perspective, there might be some scepticism to elevating architectural analysis of courts. However, this arguably reflects lawyers’ obsession with the written word — the judgment or court transcript. To what extent do these documents fully capture what happens at trial? Linda Mulcahy, Oxford’s Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, insightfully argues that “spatial dynamics can influence what evidence is forthcoming, the basis on which judgments are made and the confidence that the public have in the process of adjudication”. A recent Counsel magazine article provocatively asks: does it matter if the UK Supreme Court is housed in a warehouse or at the Middlesex Guildhall? Psychological research on emotional responses to architecture may assist with an answer.
Context: Brutal Beeching
A new book, The Democratic Courthouse, highlights that the Beeching reforms of the early 1970s led to the most extensive and expensive court building programme ever undertaken in England and Wales. Some call this the last major contribution by central government to Britain’s city centres. Their ubiquitousness means that we regularly walk past these (to some) concrete carbuncles without batting an eyelid.
The Beeching reforms led to the production of one of the first substantive courthouse design guides in the world, which prescribed a set of practices and specifications for every new court from 1971 onwards. This provided scope for re-visiting established conventions about courthouse design in the democratic age. Before this period, most court buildings had been built in the 19th-century, often reflecting the interests of stakeholders as opposed to the everyday user. These stakeholders disproportionately included mercantile and industrial classes benefitting from light-touch regulation of the Victorian economy and legal doctrines forged in the period. Inevitably, the patrician and paternalistic attitudes of these sections of society informed the layout of courts.
The Democratic Courthouse is particularly strong on its treatment of the intellectual and aesthetic rupture with the Victorian courts during the Beeching reforms period. The book explains that the intervening years since the Victorian age had seen significant shifts in the political and social context in which public buildings were designed. Importantly, “universal suffrage, the advent of two World Wars and the rise of socialism promoted a new sensitivity towards the ideologies of egalitarianism and participation in the public sphere, a renewed recognition of the importance of the right of the populace to be treated with dignity and respect”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thatcher’s 1979 election, bringing with it a radically different philosophy of state, is presented as later taking court design in a very different direction.
Seeing like a state
The convergence of the highpoints of British social democracy (1945–79) and modernist and Brutalist court design invites engagement with one of the most influential anthropology books of the past 25 years. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State makes sweeping yet convincing arguments about 20th-century states’ attempts to improve the human condition, which paradoxically have failed. Often admirable and legitimate developmental ends have been achieved by coercive means, failing to take rights seriously.
A central idea in the book is a critique of “authoritarian high modernism” — confidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with scientific laws. Le Corbusier, lauded today by many Brutalist fangirls and boys on social media and among expert opinion, does not come off lightly. Scott polemically mentions the architect in the same breath as totalitarian leaders like Lenin, as both “cultivated an Olympian ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions”. Le Corbusier’s influence on many modernist English courts means Scott’s criticism warrants consideration.
Scott is sceptical of Le Corbusier’s mechanistic worldview and sees its material expression in the urban planning of the new, modernist capital for Brazil, Brasilia, which he thinks rides roughshod over everyday life. Critics of these new towns have often seen them, at worst, as vehicles of repression and social control. However, in the English context and on the level of individual court buildings, the thrust of Scott’s critique does not hold much water.
By contrast, 60s and 70s courts can be seen in a far more emancipatory light. New social and economic rights and the rise of judicial review occurred in tandem with the building of these new courts. A contemporary commentator’s view of their purpose is revealing: “the resolution of the dialogue between the individual and state — the rulers and the ruled — and a building which symbolizes the health and viability of such a social contract”.
Dutch writer, Rutger Bregman, has recently spoken about how the Overton window — the spectrum of policies deemed acceptable by voters and the political class — has shifted in a more statist direction in the wake of Covid-19. Undoubtedly this Conservative government has assumed responsibilities unthinkable just a few weeks ago. Does 60s/70s court design therefore concretely preserve insights from another more communitarian period in Britain’s national culture?
Psychology and pandemic
The psychological research on links between the form a building takes and the sorts of behaviours likely within it is particularly interesting. In the context of a rapid transition to remote hearings in recent weeks, these insights are very relevant. If you think the role of court buildings is complex, this rise of virtual hearings is problematic. One architect studying courts asserts, “Their architectural form not only follows function but is a physical interface between the rule of law and the society it serves”.
Architecture can be seen as providing the visual cues for patterns of movement, encounter and avoidance. Empirical research suggests that pathways, yards, small or covered up windows and hidden doorways provide negative environmental signs about whether people feel welcome in a place. Human behaviour has also been found to be influenced by room size, shape, architectural materials, features, furnishings and finishes. Stress can be caused by environmental designs when environmental demands exceed coping resource.
Bearing this in mind, the more emancipatory and less hierarchical form of the courts under consideration may play a key, intangible role in hearings, which cannot easily be captured in written documentation. With mental health concerns increasingly salient, the discussed psychological findings are particularly poignant. Beyond the current pandemic, ambitious thinkers have already been asking searching questions about new directions for society. To paraphrase an idealistic yet pragmatic visionary, Eleanor Roosevelt, some of the answers may be closer to home than first thought.
Nick Queffurus is a future trainee lawyer in London with interests across the humanities and social sciences, lately in Cultural Studies particularly.
