Houston Courthouse

In Ajay Manthripragada's Rice University fall 2019 studio, "Telos and Techne,” students were asked to design a courthouse in Houston.

My project productively engages with questions of scale that are pertinent to expectations of the civic—in particular, it asks how the civic has been historically represented. Six courtrooms are placed underground, while the rest of the civic spaces of the building remain above ground. This generates a vertical division, and gives each section of the building a different formal task. Below ground level, the building is allowed to expand to the edge of the site—since it has been freed from constraints of having an urban presence—resulting in a rectangular floor plan. Furthermore, the underground level establishes a grid of columns that serves to organize the floors above as well as to dictate the positioning of the lightwells. Above ground, the grid is confronted with an irregular container and generates new spatial relationships.