ARCHITECTURE
So far, so good: the new federal courthouse
By Barry A. Muskat; photos by kc kratt

Rendering of the completed new Federal Courthouse project.

Still under construction, the new federal courthouse is emerging in the form of an intriguing elliptical mass. Built on a site that occupies a full block of Delaware Avenue at Niagara Square, it’s neighbored by City Hall, the new Avant, and the McKinley Monument. It enjoys clear views of County Hall and almost every other city landmark. (The intimate proximity of the venerable Statler Building now makes that project’s forward movement even more crucial.)

The courthouse was a long time in coming. The process started fourteen years ago. When finally approved, it experienced substantial delay by the federal moratorium on courthouse construction, General Services Administration (GSA) funding cuts, and the competition from many other cities that also vied for new buildings. (There are currently approximately fifty cities with projects hoping to be approved.) It took vigorous advocacy by the WNY congressional delegation to finally get the project started.

Courthouse architect Bill Pederson (a founding partner and design partner of Kohn Pederson Fox) sees a strong correlation between the care invested in the way a courthouse is put together and the experience a person has when entering the judicial process; Pederson cites Judge Stephen Breyer’s careful oversight of Boston’s courthouse construction (before Breyer became a Supreme Court justice) as an important influence. The architect has designed three federal court buildings (Minneapolis, Portland, and now Buffalo) and has found the experiences to be “incredibly positive.” He observes, “The judges have unique personalities but with a commonality that shares a tremendous commitment to producing something first-rate.”

The new Federal Courthouse is emerging in the form of an intriguing elliptical mass. It is built on a site that occupies a full block of Delaware Avenue at Niagara Square.
Pederson praises Judges Richard Arcara and William Skretny as being “incredibly dedicated to this process, putting so much personal energy into the understanding, details, and philosophy of the building.” (Indeed, an architectural conference several years ago examined the process of designing federal courthouses and revealed just how much influence federal judges have during the design process, although the GSA is technically the client for the buildings.) Pederson paints Arcara and Skretny as determined to produce a courthouse that could express the openness of the judicial process and its civic role in the community while delivering a building that would make a real contribution to the city.

Pederson talks about the challenge of planning a building that would represent the highest level of construction while keeping within the very strict budget of the General Service Administration—its limitations have become increasingly demanding over the years. His firm initially presented three designs, challenged to meet that budget without compromising any aspect of the design. Noting that the most expensive ingredient of many building is the exterior wall, Pederson explains that the thought process that shaped the Buffalo courthouse structure benefits from the efficiencies of its basic geometries. A rectilinear building has ten percent more wall surface area than the cylindrical shape, so the inherent efficiencies of enclosing the conical design result in direct cost savings.

The design that emerged is essentially composed of three elements, with Pederson drawing an analogy to Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral in Florence, Italy. That Renaissance icon includes the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s dome, the Baptistery, and Giotto’s bell tower. Those three components create an urban gathering place and represent a dialogue of community. That’s the goal Pederson’s design aims to achieve with its own tower, atrium, and courthouse buildings. The courthouse would be analogous to the duomo. The elevator tower is like the campanile, but instead of a bell tower, the glass enclosure is topped by a glowing lantern. The atrium that faces Niagara Square becomes a gardenlike pavilion to welcome people into the main courthouse building. In the ongoing controversy whether classical styles or Modernist designs are more appropriate for civic buildings, Pederson’s approach seems to respect and incorporate historic traditions while interpreting them in a contemporary vocabulary. The entrance pavilion will house a piece of art by Robert Mangold, the Buffalo-area-born, internationally known abstract painter. Pederson notes his work was selected because “It is very serene, almost Zen-like, in its quality. Artwork that would calm the spirit, rather than agitate, seemed an appropriate way to set the tone for people coming into the judicial process.” The commission coincided with Mangold’s series of column paintings, and the work is now being fabricated in Germany. (See Bruce Adams’s sidebar for Mangold’s perspective on the commission below.)

One of the biggest requirements of the building is to comply with very specific federal standards of resistance to potential explosives. If glass were used for the entire building shell, the cost of including this protection would demolish the budget. By using precast concrete panels, the blast requirements could be efficiently satisfied with a third of the cost. Glass leaves will be pinned to the concrete piers, leaving a one-foot separation between panels and building to allow them to be cleaned. (A mock-up showing the application is built at street level now.) These translucent glass panels will transform the visual characteristics of the ominous drum you see now, as well as functioning as a solar screen. As they pick up the afternoon sun, Pederson believes that they will reflect light, almost like the facets of a jewel. The courthouse project is ten stories and 264,000 square feet. It will house the courts and judicial chambers that are currently in the Dillon Federal Courthouse on Court Street. Underground parking will be zoned for security purposes. Three main elevators will service the public areas, with interior elevators for prisoners and other circulation. Most floors will house two district court rooms, each with judges’ chambers, jury deliberation rooms, and circulation systems. There’s also a urinalysis laboratory and a series of offices for district clerks, the U.S. Attorney, grand juries, Probation, and the hierarchy of federal courts.

The atrium that faces Niagara Square will become a gardenlike pavilion to welcome people into the main courthouse building.
Most of the floors are built on a raised system that allows voice, data, and electric wiring to run under the floors. Systems have been consolidated and shared between departments to save both space and money. Brian Loliger, assistant system manager and project manager for technology in the new building, notes that because of the sensitive nature of their communications, the court uses very little wireless. Although that could change in the future, they still need the pathways to accommodate the miles of hard wiring. “Unlike our current 1930s building, built when no one had even heard of a computer, the new building is designed for technology and security so we won’t have the problems we face today.” If judicial procedures allow, mechanicals throughout the building will let litigants and juries view monitors and have benefit of full evidence systems, video conference systems, VCR, DVD, CD, and a growing range of technologies.

Skretny sees the new courthouse as a “beacon for Buffalo’s future as a city and our legal system. In a real sense, it’s not just the building structure that’s so exciting, but what it represents. It’s the statement that we are prepared to meet the challenges of administering justice in modern times, without disrespecting the reverence for principled administration according to the rule of law without bias of status, age, creed, race, national origin, or gender.”

Arcara talks about the building as a metaphor for the U.S. court system, significant in both stature and purpose. In addition to being beautiful architecturally, it’s complex. “It may not be the biggest courthouse, but we think it will be the most user-friendly. And it has character—there’s no building like it in the entire country.” He adds, “The glass of the pavilion building will have the Constitution of the United States etched in its panels, displaying the freedoms that our country is built upon.”

In addition to the building’s massive elliptical drum whose crown is dramatically slashed, there are several individual elements that look to me like they will be showstoppers. First is the sharp prow of the pavilion building formed by the meeting of two angled walls. Second is the strikingly tall elevator shaft that tapers with an interesting asymmetry to form a tower that will be capped by a lantern. Third is the taut glass triangle that forms a second prow looking north and south at the west end of each floor’s glass gallery.

A framed grouping of four photographs currently hangs in Arcara’s private office—a gag Christmas gift given five years ago by his nephew. To challenge his uncle on his oft-voiced adage that there’s lots of talk, but nothing ever gets done in Buffalo, the montage begins with a picture of Niagara Square captioned “Arcara-Skretny Court House, 2004.” Three more photographs repeat the same unchanged image with the captions showing 2010, 2015, 2025. Arcara displays the photos with humor, seeming perfectly satisfied, happy that his dismal forecast has been proven wrong. The undisputed verdict is that a new photograph captioned “2011” will soon be able to replace the old montage.

Barry A. Muskat is a businessman and an architectural historian, as well as Spree’s architecture critic.
Robert Mangold
Shining on at the new courthouse

Since the early 1970s the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program has been commissioning large-scale artworks by the nation’s leading artists to be integrated into newly constructed federal buildings. Soon after unveiling plans for the new United States Courthouse building now under construction in Niagara Square, the GSA began searching for a suitable artist. North Tonawanda native and internationally known minimalist painter Robert Mangold was among those who sprang to mind.

“I believe it was 2004 that I came to meet with the jury,” says Mangold, who was visiting Buffalo recently for the opening of Robert Mangold, Beyond the Line: Paintings and Project 2000–2008, a survey of recent work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The artist sums up the GSA panel’s selection procedure and his own creative process in a single extended sentence as understated as the curved lines in one of his minimalist paintings: “I came to see what the building was, and they talked to me about different possibilities, and I thought about doing stained glass in the entry area, and I went back and did some drawings, and met with them again, and then they officially okayed the idea in rough form.”

Mangold’s contribution to the courthouse will take the form of monumental translucent red, green, and blue stained glass window panels installed in the triangular entrance pavilion. Lines weave lyrically down each colored windowpane, simulating the artist’s own graphite drawing technique. The courthouse windows parallel the vertical “column” paintings the artist was working on in his studio at the time, which are among the works currently on display at the Albright-Knox.

Mangold was born in North Tonawanda and attended North Tonawanda High School. His family moved a couple of times but remained in the region. “The [Erie] canal was always the connecting link; I always lived near the canal. The canal was like my Mississippi.” Mangold reminisces about visiting the Albright-Knox as a child: “The museums were all free, and I remember the kids would cut across the museum from the park, come in one door and out the other; it was like a pathway.” Mangold also reflects on the time when the newly emergent abstract expressionist painter Clyfford Still was in town in 1959 to install his solo exhibition. “It was just very relaxed and informal, and I don’t know if there was such a big fuss made about it because art was such a non-topic. Basically, you could go through your whole life and not know contemporary art existed.” But Mangold did know, and the Albright-Knox became a major influence on him during the years he studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art. “That was at the time when the Albright-Knox was getting all that wonderful [abstract expressionist] art. Every time I came home for Christmas I would visit.”

The courthouse building is scheduled to open in 2011. Mangold’s exhibition at the Albright-Knox runs through the end of January.

—Bruce Adams
Mangold exhibition photos by Tom Loonan.


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