Courthouses of the Future: Smaller, Smarter, Faster, and Unbundled

By Phil Ehlinger, Assistant Borough Manager

As the County develops their plan for improving Buck’s deficient Court facilities, issues of new court technologies and alternate facility designs have gained interest. The recently released report by the County’s architects has proposed several courthouse “campus” design alternatives that could benefit from these new courthouse technologies.

One option of interest in the report, known as “Option E”, calls for a new Courthouse and a new parking garage to both be built on the current county parking garage site. The County has recently said that the existing parking garage structure is unfit for expansion and must be rebuilt. This has created a new potential court site, and spawned “Option E”. This option has gained significant public support and is well suited to utilize new information technologies to reduce costs and building size and provide improve functionality.

In February 2002, the Borough suggested consideration of a newly emerging concept called “Distributed Courts.” Distributed Courts seek to “un-bundle” court functions using new information technologies, and distribute them in groups of smaller buildings that can fit more easily into existing community centers such as ours. The potential advantages are: 1) higher levels of functionality and cost effectiveness, 2) improved accessibility, 3) greater security, and 4) a restored legibility for thejustice system in terms of scale and symbolic clarity. [1]

To explore “unbundling” the courts, one must first study the relationships of the court’s functions to related agencies and other occupancies. Typically, court functions are combined with spaces set aside for the DA, the public defenders, probation officers, recorder of deeds, etc. The first study would be to explore how these non-court functions can beseparated out, and in doing so, restore clarity to the essential function of a courthouse as traditionally conceived [1].

The second level of “unbundling” the courts is to recognize that new court technologies have broken the umbilical cord of the physical case file that has tied spaces together as it travels through the judicial process. This allows the courts to rethink, redesign, and disaggregate some functions of the courthouse. This unbundling strategy would study and recognize the very different functional distinctions between 1) Adjudication (core spaces for trials, hearings, prisoner handling, secure storage, and alternative dispute resolution) 2) Work processing areas (case processing, filing, updating, receiving and routing pleadings, handling payments and cashiering with filing, physical and electronic information storage) and 3) Basic customer service functions (research activities, recording operations, probating cases) 1. While the lines of distinction between adjudication, work processing, and customer service are not always clear, nor is complete separation or compartmentalization necessarily desirable in every instance. It does, however, present an opportunity to reduce the mass and volume required under one single roof. Breaking the courthouse down into its component parts, all linked by a “technological backbone” of information systems, provides an opportunity to create a building that is more user friendly, accessible, secure, and in scale with existing historic communities such as Doylestown.

Along with potential for operational economies, distributed courts may also allow two seemingly contradictory mandates of security and accessibility to be simultaneously satisfied. Smaller distributed court buildings can both enhance security and accessibility in a way that one large building cannot.

Perhaps one of the greatest advantages to Doylestown Borough of a proposal for a campus of distributed courts is the potential to reduce the scale of the buildings, and increase architectural responsiveness to community context. The restoration of “legibility” to the courthouse as a civic icon can only be enhanced when appropriate scale and massing are part of the building’s programming. Doylestown’s responsibility as host to the Bucks County Courts is only exceeded by our responsibility as stewards of the community’s character and architectural fabric. Borough Council’s successful track record of historic preservation and successful community planning speaks for itself. The Borough is currently reviewing the County’ s report with the help of several local architects and will be hosting an upcoming public meeting for residents to learn more about the various options.

A new era of technological innovation enables this generation of court planners and officials to consider new solutions and create newopportunities for court designs and alternative approaches to facility planning. When the County Commissioners finally make a decision regarding the courthouse, Doylestown Borough hopes that it is a decision that reflects the civic values of the community and incorporates the latest technologies and concepts in courthouse design such as unbundled “Distributed Courts.”

Footnotes:1. National Court Technology Conferences/ Rushing, Phillips, Hobstetter