A case for light and order

Courthouse sets a new standard for public buildings

The new federal courthouse in Springfield curves around two old trees. Architect Moshe Safdie was determined to save the trees. (photos by timothy hursley)

SPRINGFIELD - Should a courthouse be as delightful as a garden pavilion? As white, as bright, as sun-filled?

Isn't a courthouse supposed to celebrate the dignity and discipline of the law by means of architecture that is sober and, well, maybe even a little grim, a little frowning?

A new federal courthouse here breaks all those rules. Designed by the well-known architect Moshe Safdie, who operates out of Somerville and Cambridge, it's one of the most inviting public buildings I've ever seen.

The courthouse stands on a major street, State Street. It's pretty much in the middle of an informal civic center, surrounded by handsome older buildings - a cathedral, an armory, a library, a museum, all of which are surfaced in dark stone or red brick. In the middle of this sober architectural party, the new courthouse seems to spiral out like a ballerina. It's white, it's delicate, and it sweeps across the site in a long curve, very much a star attraction on a civic stage.

I liked just about everything in this remarkable building. Daylight is everywhere. If you're a judge, for example, your private chambers are housed in a diamond-shaped annex at the rear of the main courthouse. To get to your courtroom in the main building, you walk across a glass bridge, perhaps an ironic play on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice on which, long ago, condemned prisoners walked from court to prison. At Springfield the walk is delightful and psychologically renewing, as you experience a view of sky and treetops before you move on to your courtroom.

The courtrooms are gems, too. Every one is lit by enough natural daylight, through windows or skylights, so that it doesn't feel, as so many of today's courtrooms do, as if it were buried in the dark belly of some architectural whale. Safdie has only four courtrooms to worry about, so he can site them all on the top floor, which makes things easier. But he then makes another delightful move. The courtroom ceilings, like the building as a whole, are white curves. Low over the judge's bench, they sweep upward over the visitors' gallery at the back of the room. There's an architect's pleasure in sculpting form here, but there are practical virtues too. The rising ceiling doubles the height of the space with no loss of human scale. And it also pulls away from walls to let daylight enter.

Circulation is impeccable, a tough job in a courthouse where lawyers, judges, prisoners, and the public often need separate routes. All the main corridors are windowed, and on the inner side of one is a 300-foot black-and-white mural, "Loopy Doopy," by the late Sol LeWitt. The response to the threat of terrorism, which has turned many government buildings into fortresses, is here almost invisible. You have to look to notice that the handsome garden walls are car-bomb barriers, and the glass of the façade is made blast-proof by columns.

If there's a weakness, it's maybe a tendency to celebrate the whiteness and brightness a little too much in the entry area, where there's a big all-glass pavilion with a glass roof that slopes and droops like a fabric. The pavilion is certainly handsome, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the building. It is intended as a space for public meetings and celebrations.

Safdie, now 70, has been famous among architects ever since his late twenties, when he designed a remarkable experimental building for the 1967 Montreal World's Fair. It looked like a child's tall, loose pile of blocks, but each block contained one or more rooms of a dwelling in the sky. It was called Habitat, and it's nice to report that 41 years later, Habitat is still there and still in good shape. Many of the owners have enlarged their homes by breaking through a wall and absorbing the unit next door. Safdie himself still owns a condo at Habitat.

While based in the Boston area, Safdie works all over the world. I've found his work uneven over the years, sometimes wonderful but sometimes the result of great ideas that remain half-baked. Bostonians know him for one of his best works, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, where he created a central organizing atrium and a row of some of the best gallery spaces of our time. Safdie also designed a fine glassy chapel for the Harvard Business School.

Good clients make good architects, as Robert Frost somehow failed to say. Bostonians remember judges Douglas Woodlock and Stephen Breyer, who appointed themselves the clients for what became the Moakley Courthouse on the South Boston waterfront (where they both expected to work, before Breyer moved on to the Supreme Court) and, by insisting on high standards, greatly improved that building. Similarly in Springfield, federal judge Michael Ponsor - who was the one who suggested a new courthouse in the first place - is credited with holding the line on quality.

The courthouse was built in a time when construction costs were rising faster than anyone I know can remember, and it was subjected to severe cost-cutting. Safdie complains about many things that were lost. But if you don't know about them, you don't miss them. The building remains a winner.

The Springfield courthouse had another client, of course, which was the General Services Administration, the agency that builds and maintains federal government buildings. Springfield was a late example of a program called Design Excellence, in which the GSA, over a period of some dozen years starting in 1990, succeeded in radically improving the quality of architecture of its new buildings. Instead of playing politics, the GSA hired the best architects and gave them the support they needed to do their work. Design Excellence still exists in name, but is no longer proactive. Springfield couldn't have happened without it.

The building wasn't always a sculpture of sweeping curves. As originally designed, it was a more conventional structure of mostly right angles. But a problem arose. Everyone, including the architect, wanted to save two huge old trees on the site, a beech and a linden. But when a horticulturalist was consulted, he said that trees wouldn't survive if the building came closer to them than 30 feet at any point.

It was by pulling his building back from the trees, and reshaping it to curl around them, that Safdie arrived at the final design. Looking at the building and the trees today, you sense a deferential dance of architecture with nature.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.