At the site’s perimeter, bollards prevent unauthorised vehicles from driving onto the site and establish a formal language in which the ground is ‘marked’ by a field of totems. The totem becomes a repetitive element throughout the project, extending the court’s ‘structure’ into the landscape. The first true physical barriers are encountered 30 metres outside the structural perimeter of the building at the drop-off points for the victims of the atrocities and other public participants of the court. It is at this moment that the architecture must accommodate not only a surge of visitors, but also separate those parties into flows of access zones. The ICC estimates that roughly 15,000 people will move through the building on a given day, the vast majority of whom will have special access privileges to areas of the building that are inaccessible from the public ground plane.
One could argue that the ICC’s shift to centralisation and its adoption of an architectural style that many consider to be hegemonic in its unrelenting service to both public and private global institutions, speaks to a cosmopolitanism that reduces the architecture to a single ideological position. It accepts that glass equals transparency, a free plan equals liberty, massive featureless boxes equal neutral abstraction, and that these associations will be legible by every culture that encounters it. I would say that architecture has moved past these conventions. Architecture has within its contemporary tool box a myriad of spatial devices that enable designers to push architectural form into new experiential and metaphoric relationships with its public, spaces that transcend the modernist forms of the past to become a mediator of human experience rather than an exhibition of ideological principles. The ICC’s new facility will be built on the periphery of the city, and once completed will form an architectural bridge between the urban environment and the landscape that exists beyond it. The tension between the urban and the pastoral is but one of several architectural tensions that develop within the project. Security and openness, sombreness and relief, institutional identity and the experience of the individual — each of these tensions is brought into architectural focus here as they attempt to resolve the ICC’s institutional concerns over permanence, identity and authority. In this counter-proposal, the courthouse of the ICC is set back from the Alexanderkazerne to make a generous landscaped forecourt, wherein the first visible sign of the Court’s architecture are apparent. The forecourt of deploys both a visible and invisible network of security devices, resulting in moments of technological intensity that dot the landscape and become conceptual point loads of institutional identity. This security landscape is the new reality of the twenty-first century, the realisation of a virtual network where the density of its physical nodes increases as it approaches the court, culminating in x-ray machines and metal detectors that directly interact with the public. There is a mechanical harshness to this approach, one that must be balanced (if not overcome) by an accompanying sensorial experience that ameliorates the impact of the landscape’s security features on the Court’s visitors. What is a climactic moment in the security progression, is made episodic by the architecture that breaks down the single-mindedness of the security landscape.
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