A Hall of Justice That’s Actually Sexy

It may be hard to believe for those who like government buildings decoratedwith granite staircases and marble colonnades, but the most beautiful courthouse built in America in years is a work as sleek and modern as a Swiss watch.

Designed by Richard Meier & Partners and completed last month, the $200-million federal courthouse in Long Island has all of the trademark elements that have made the architect a celebrated master of classical Modernism: crisp geometric forms, white enamel panels and enormous windows hidden behind brise-soleils. But rarely has Meier used those elements with such delicacy. The result is a building that challenges conventional expectations of what a courthouse should look like. Instead of a monument to legal authority, Meier has created a perfect symbol for the elusiveness of absolute truth.

The building--which houses bankruptcy and district courts--stands on a flat suburban landscape surrounded by a carpet of trees. You approach it across a vast, concrete plaza that recalls the empty urban landscapes of 1950s-era Italian neo-realist films--visions of alienation and loss.

But the building’s exquisite detailing softens that image. A white, cylindrical entry pavilion rises up out of the plaza. Nestled against the building, its slightly asymmetrical form gives the plaza a more muscular presence. Behind the rotunda, the building’s main facade--an enormous glass plane shielded behind rows of long horizontal louvers--seems to hover like an ephemeral screen. The overall effect is surprisingly sexy.

Inside, the rotunda is simply breathtaking. Meier has used rotundas in earlier projects. The Getty Center’s light-filled rotunda, for instance, which serves as the museum’s main entry, is one of Meier’s best spaces. But the Islip rotunda may be even better. Its slightly asymmetrical form, which rises 190 feet into the air before tapering at the top to frame a circular skylight, is reminiscent of Guarino Guarini’s glorious 17th century Baroque domes.

Once inside the main building, however, that visual eloquence gives way to a highly mechanized precision. The building is conceived as three parallel zones. The public circulates along the front of the building and the judges in back, with the courtrooms set between them. The layout solves a security problem, protecting court officials from unwanted intrusions. But it also allows Meier to create a series of distinct, interlocking environments.

The public corridors extend the length of the building between the delicate screen of the main facade and the polished granite wall that encloses the courtrooms at the building’s core. Standing here, you peer out over the lush green landscape of Long Island. Once you enter the courtrooms, however, that world becomes a fragile memory. Compact, clad in cherrywood paneling, the courtrooms have the feel of a luxurious, sealed vault. The contrast is striking: on one side, the extroverted world of the senses, on the other the introverted world of the mind.

A towering atrium, meanwhile, is carved out of the center of the building. Black-robed judges walk along one side of the atrium, ordinary citizens along the other. The building, in effect, becomes a gigantic filtering device, culminating in the courtrooms, where good and bad, right and wrong, are sorted out with equal precision.

It is a world so precisely calibrated that at times it seems on the verge of shattering. And what better image for a courthouse? The traditional Greek Revival courthouse served to give the legal system its aura of historical weight and moral authority. Meier’s design suggests another meaning. Instead of a mask of institutional importance, the building embodies the painstaking, maddening search for a moment of absolute clarity.