proposal | programme + architecture by jeffrey olinger aia
scaffold structure effects security agency
interstitial the international criminal court
The International Criminal Court (ICC) as a twenty-first century institution reflects the world at the onset of this new century, but it is rooted in the development of the previous century’s struggle to pacify a restive world. The universalism embedded in the ICC’s mission has been a global aspiration since the end of World War I, but the political cohesion needed to establish the court remains elusive. It wasn’t until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and conflicts erupted in the Balkans and central Africa in the 1990s that the UN began in earnest to establish a permanent tribunal for war crimes. Each of these conflicts were granted its own independent UN tribunal, which served as the basis for establishing the Rome Statute (ratified in 2002), the primary political agreement behind the ICC. The ICC is by its very nature both a highly charged and politically tenuous institution. Its mission is to adjudicate tribunals that hold individuals accountable for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially when justice for the victims of such crimes cannot or will not be achieved by the domestic nation state. It tries crimes universally condemned by all nations, religions and cultures, and seeks to assign responsibility to the individuals that perpetrated the crimes, not the entire country or culture in which they were committed. This is a lofty and admirable goal, but the ICC is not without its critics. Its legal authority is based in the concept of international law, which only exists insofar as individual nations agree to recognise it; neither the United States, China, Russia nor India
ratified the Rome Statute, all stating concerns over national sovereignty. Moreover, the very idea of a unified global community speaking in one voice through a legal body can quickly become dystopic — instead of a collection of disparate voices coming together in moral agreement, it can be seen as an act of hegemony that erases the diversity of speech, of culture and of nations. Such concerns are amplified by the ICC’s current physical presence (or lack thereof) in a repurposed office tower in the Hague. The ICC has investigated eight ‘situations’, each one a scene of genocide where gross ethical and moral misconduct has occurred. Each case nudges the ICC closer to the centre of the global political arena, with warrants by the Court holding weight in the community of nations. Meanwhile, the ICC continues to work towards establishing itself as a permanent international judicial body. Like many other nascent political bodies, especially those without a clear geographic point of reference, the ICC confronts issues of permanence, identity and authority. These are the three conditions of its architectural presence. It is within this context that the ICC held an international design competition in the spring of 2008 for its permanent premises. The short list for the competition included David Chipperfield, Francisco Mangado, OMA/Search, Ingenhoven, Wiel Arets and Kengo Kuma & Associates. This heavy-hitting field produced a winning scheme by the Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen, who have provided six neatly detailed modernist abstract cubic forms that recede into the landscape, stylistically and ideologically continuous with the
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