The site for this project was located on a box-store strip squeezed between two busy thoroughfares. The development along the street has no unified urban identity. Across one of the thoroughfares is a KMart shopping center and its enormous parking lot; across the other is a nicely landscaped bank of the Charles River. The courthouse program was complicated, including 5 courtrooms of various sizes, judges quarters, jury pool room, prisoners holding cells, deputies and police offices, and a record-keeping facility. The key technical design challenge was to provide separate and secure access routes and entrances to the courtrooms for the judges, the public, the jurors, and the defendants.
The generating idea for the courthouse design is to create a civic space that gives to the visitor a sense that they have arrived somewhere significant. This was achieved by splitting the program into two separate buildings that face each other across a landscaped public plaza. The west building contains all of the secure program elements; its materials are primarily masonry and its identity is fortress-like. The east building contains public programs including the jury pool room, a library, a cafe, basketball court, and parking. Its layout is very open and the facade is a glass curtain wall. Between the two buildings is a plaza that connects to and takes advantage of the openness of the parking lot to create a broad swath opening to the river. The inland, southerly part of the plaza is paved with a pattern that is regulated by a 9' x 18' module: the dimension of a parking space (the module defining the "public" space of the parking lot across the street), while the northerly part of the plaza is planted with grass and leads to the river.