This juvenile justice center is the first of three projects that will address a county’s overcrowded court system, improve safety, and reduce reliance on leased property.
Juvenile court is just one of several user groups housed within the 174,000-square-foot abandoned office building, originally built in 1971 as a JC Penney. Strategically placing high activity spaces on first floor with the quieter functions on adjacent floors allowed a multi-user facility to operate cohesively.
Three of the interior floors are interconnected by an open stairway which replaced escalators. A new public elevator supplements the stairway as primary vertical circulation. The centralized open stairway also serves as a porthole for daylighting gathered from the corridors and windows.
The requirement for separate public, secure judicial, and secure detainee circulation presented a challenge for daylighting the courtrooms. At exterior facing courtroom, the high ceilings allowed the use of transoms to borrow daylight over top of the back-of-courtroom circulation corridors.
