As the courtroom opens skyward it provides a light well for the upper levels of the building, maximising spatial efficiencies, whilst interweaving the functions of the court with the courtroom space itself. By nesting the courtroom into the building in such a fundamental way, the architecture seeks to create a spatial and programmatic interdependency, where the space of the courtroom is made possible by the void carved from the administrative spaces above, while the administrative spaces are made habitable through the spatial relief provided by the volume of the courtroom void. The remainder of the administrative spaces march up the periphery of the building in successive rings of departmental program. The stacks of upper level spaces are pinned by four principal circulation towers that function as the internal support for the roof and are concealed in the poché of the court room walls, becoming the infrastructural link between the erudite world of the ICC’s administrative spaces and the hard confines of the high security program housed underneath the public ground plan.
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By deploying these geometries the architecture makes an iconic space, unique and naturalistic, that owes more to the figures of sandstone cliffs than it does to the industrialised world around it. The architecture draws upon a broader natural environment for its authority, unlike a hygienic modernism that quickly becomes dystopic once it combines with the modern security landscape. Here, the architecture exists as a softened edge, despite the harshness of the world that surrounds it. c
It is possible for architecture to provide a public service as an active element in the experience of the trial. In so doing, it seeks to express the values of the institution it houses. Few mediums offer such a profound capacity for creating these greater moments of collective cultural expression, which in itself creates an imperative for design to fulfil its promise as a powerful agent in the mediation of some of our most challenging human experiences.
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