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By Russell Fortmeyer
The Manhattan Family Courts building, designed by Haines, Lundberg and Waehler, was built in 1975 as a Brutalist concrete structure. Clad in forbidding black granite, it had few windows, an almost total lack of street-level transparency, and was an intimidating presence for families undergoing emotional court proceedings. The building had even been dubbed “Darth Vader.”
Black granite was famously used in Manhattan on Eero Saarinen’s building for CBS, an early 1960s example of a concrete skyscraper where the structure defined the limitations of the exterior perimeter cladding system. While Saarinen’s building relied on wedged columns to expand the amount of sunlight on each floor, the Family Courts building’s structural system was angled at 45 degrees as a way to visually connect the interior to Foley Square to the south. Both projects’ angular plans succeeded in making the windows virtually disappear when viewed at certain approaches, further accentuating the buildings’ fortresslike appearance.
Photo: © Elliott Kaufman |
| The Manhattan Family Courts building’s original black granite panels (below), which were already falling off when the building opened, were replaced with a light granite unitized-curtain-wall system (left). |
Photo: Courtesy Mitchell/Giurgola Architects |
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Compounding the 460,000-square-foot Family Courts building’s ghoulish presence in Lower Manhattan, on the day it opened its granite cladding system was already in the process of falling off the concrete structure. The city responded by constructing a covered walkway around it—intended to be temporary, but ultimately permanent—which added to its unwelcoming presence. The ground-floor lobby posed a number of problems, including poor mechanical systems, harsh lighting, a proliferation of confusing signage, and deficient space for security equipment.
In 1999, the city and state agencies responsible for the building asked Mitchell/Giurgola Architects to undertake an assessment of the its structural, systems, and programming deficiencies in an effort to begin rectifying its sad legacies. What began as a study eventually evolved into a complete reclad project that allowed the architects to reconsider the building’s appearance with a more contemporary understanding of justice in mind.
Steve Dietz, AIA, of Mitchell/Giurgola, considers the original design a product of an aesthetic moment that gave little consideration to the site or the context of the client’s business. “The judges [felt] the building was not what people expected,” Dietz says. “We wanted to upgrade its sense of authority.”
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