law-courts: The Law Courts, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
Designed 1973
Landscape by Cornelia Oberlander
The seven-storey Law Courts complex boasts facilities which reflect the most advanced concepts in jurisprudence. The Law Courts building is organized into four major components: public space, courtrooms, judges' chambers and administrative and support facilities. Major public spaces include the main floor Great Hall and three galleries. All are visually and physically connected. The building accommodates 35 courtrooms including 13 civil, 11 criminal, three appeal, three assize, three motion and two courtrooms designed especially for complex commercial cases.
The Law Courts are distinguished by a sloping glass roof that measures well over an acre. The glass roof serves as a major symbol of publicness - its transparency inviting the public to enter, enjoy the public surroundings or partake in judicial procedures. The glass roof adds to the outdoor feeling of the civic space and facilitates a number of the courtrooms and all public galleries with natural sunlight. The spacetruss/skylight provides the roof and one wall of the main court floor and the terraced public galleries of the courthouse. The roof covers approximately 50,000 square feet of public space. Covered public galleries provide public access to courtrooms and they accommodate public seating, witness waiting and interview rooms, display and information spaces. This space is naturally air-conditioned. The regulation of its warmth and coolness is maintained in other wall-enclosed portions of the building. The concept was to capitalize upon and promote effects caused by the natural circulation of air. Water is stored and warmed during off-peak hours, which is used to heat the complex during the day. This system required the construction of an 840,000-gallon storage tank. Its effectiveness is optimized by a sophisticated computer control system, however the concept is based upon the fact that when a layer of warm water lies over a layer of cold water, the two will not mix because of differing densities. At night, the chilled water in the tank is regulated by piping water from the top into the chillers, and slipping it back into the bottom of the tank. Hot water, on the other hand, is the basis of the heating system. Water, 150,000 gallons of it, is contained within the Law Courts building to create the waterfalls. The falls themselves are created by the water circulated from the tank up over the roofs of the Government Buildings as one important fireproofing measure. The water from the falls is also useful for heating and cooling systems and for the fire sprinklers.
Photo of Law Courts roof by Geoffrey Erickson
See more Law Courts photos in "planning-3 block complex and robson square" section
