Maricopa County Justice Center & Adult Probation

At the behest of the client to consolidate, organize, and secure, the project inversely begins to imagine how it can also become permeable. An opening-up seeks new encounters, to confront the determinism of top-down vision, lowest cost building, presumption of belonging to an existing campus, housing programs with warehouse efficiency, and the streamlined movement of people. Permeability seeks to give breath to the fortitude of judicial parishioners sought to care and relate to their public.

The project aims at protracted time. Permeability opens up space and time to stimulate and reflect. Disparate ideas and elements come in contact and influence one another socially and spatially. Socializing the making of buildings infuses the top-down hierarchy of vision with the material intelligence of makers, operators, and publics.

Creating gaps between programs opens a shared entry between them. Formally, the simple rectangle referencing campus mediates long east-west solar exposures. The corners of the rectangle are pulled apart and softened. Permeability of corners offers the legibility of a commanding geometry with a tentative and indeterminant presence. Bricks materialize as much translucent as opaque. Ephemeral light materializes as object.

At the monumental stair, a gradual ascent encourages use. Changing steepness mid-landing heightens attentiveness in every step. Compression orients movement through slots of space released into daylight. Interior spaces are painted by daylight. The second-floor public concourse is organized by a theater of diurnal color.

The courtroom also offers permeable zoning. Its turnstile configuration opens gallery and well and is conducive to timely and high-volume justice at the bench. The corresponding ceiling, loosened from the determinism of the courtroom floor, suggests a weightlessness that lives alongside the weight of the solemn social function.