The new facilities for the ICC will be in The Hague, on the grounds of a decommissioned military barracks abutting massive North Sea sand dunes. The ICC’s parcel is approximately two-fifths of the total military installation’s size, the remainder of which will be transformed into a mixed-use residential development. The ICC will also become the anchor tenant of sorts for the revitalised Alexanderkazerne, a garden district near the northern edge of The Hague. The mission of the ICC is to serve a global public. This public arrives in many forms — physically as participants in the tribunals, virtually through the global media, and symbolically through the very existence of the ICC itself.Those active in the ICC’s permanent facilities represent the entire range of participants in its legal process. For some, the ICC will simply be an office adjacent to an event space, for others the court will serve as an icon of human rights, and for a few, the ICC will be a place of judgment, where the ethical principles of the world will come to bear upon them.This mix of publics initiates a series of architectural considerations that govern the relationships of spaces within the ICC, creating moments of intensity and overlap that ultimately define the architectural experience. In terms of spatial allocation, the ICC’s office requirements are vast and complex, which influences the potential massing of the building through sheer volume of space. The ground plane of the ICC is the principal point of access for the general public, and will need to negotiate a myriad of security and privacy concerns. The ICC is also a functioning high security prison, where the accused party will be processed and transported to a holding facility near the courtroom until the time of the trial, where all three of these publics will confront each other in a public hearing.
modern movement that produced the UN and earlier, the League of Nations. While the new design of the ICC’s permanent premises lies squarely within the tradition of International Modernism, the international competition format maximises the media exposure of the project, and increases the likelihood of an engaged public discourse, a sounding board for the architectural challenge at hand. The following project is response to the ICC’s 2008 Permanent Premises Competition brief and tests the relationship between architecture and the processes that take place within it. My response to the ICC program outlines a spatial polemic where concerns over institutional identity, user experience and security intersect in an architecture that both accommodates and is ‘otherworldly’. The ICC wants a presence that is inclusive and authoritative, and which uses architecture to underline its legal legitimacy; the physical permanence of the new courthouse will counteract political tenuousness and the ICC will further establish itself as a permanent international judicial body. This marks an institutional metamorphosis of the ICC from a loose confederation of 122 like- minded countries, to a singular bureaucratic entity located in the Netherlands.
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