Page 13 - Court: The Place of Law and the Space of the City

Scott 13

plinth to designate space that is distinct from the ground plane and street network of the city around. Due
to this, a consideration of Mies’ architecture is pertinent to questions of type in relation to civic programmes
of near-ubiquitous definition such as the Law Court. In the Court that Mies designed in central Chicago,
therefore, we can read not simply a seminal example of the typology, but also the instance in which those
attributes by which the archetype is now defined were heightened and rendered in such direct expression
as to distil the fundamental condition for the place of Law, which is the Court as a threshold condition that
spatially separates the real world outside from the ideal world within. In the Federal Center, this threshold is
established by three perceptible boundaries, these forming three orders through which the concerns of the
courtroom are removed from those of the immediate context and the world beyond.

Figure 8: Analytical diagram of sight lines within the Chicago courthouse.