The courthouse emerges from this landscape as an architectural inversion of its outside network. Whereas the virtual network of the ICC’s security features exist as a constellation of architectural moments against a vast and open natural field, the courthouse creates its own architectural limit in the form of its exterior structural scaffold. From this superstructure a field of steel hangers support the layers of administrative functions housed within the building, creating a multi-story interstitial space between the public ground plane and the superstructure of the court’s roof. By suspending the bulk of the institutional program above the ground level, the architecture experienced by the public is able to float above the visitors, unencumbered by structure. A newly expressive architectural plane defies gravity by twisting into a series of elliptical tori that bring daylight deep into the building’s interior. The surface topography of the ceiling becomes the key topological transformation within the building, rising five stories inside the courtroom to its full acrobatic potential. The courtroom itself carves a conic void in the dense mat of administrative spaces suspended above. This light-filled void allows the daylight inside the courtroom to shift over the course of the day, an effect made much more present as the surfaces change in their curvature, distorting the regular matrix of the space-frame, to make shadows that map the day as the proceedings progress. It is a space enlivened by natural variation and visual diversity, the opposite of the static corporate spaces that the ICC currently inhabits.
The sub-frame of the courtroom’s panelled surface is hung from the superstructure of the courthouse which is generated by an intersecting lattice of elliptical frames that create a suspended rigid body. A filigree of wood panels fastened to the surface are allowed to flex and distort out of plane, creating moments of screened opacity that wrap the courtroom. The poché of the resultant figure becomes a key infrastructural link for the courtroom, providing space for communicating stairs down to the level of the courtroom for the staff of the ICC.
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