Scales of justice - new courthouse in Middelburg, Netherlands

Architectural Review, The, July, 1996 by Peter Wislocki

Middelburg's new court building by Hubert-Jan Henket embodies a modest, tectonic pragmatism intended to foster a culture of mediation and reconciliation, as opposed to conflict and punishment.

In a secular state, the legal establishment rises even above government institutions as the seat of ultimate authority and social stability. It is reassuring to citizens for the instruments of justice to be visible, and their workings transparent. The culture of the legal system in the Netherlands has become more concerned with mediation and reconciliation in complex situations of conflict, less with clear cut issues of crime and punishment.

At a more pragmatic level, the judiciary's estate has not escaped the international move towards private ownership. Twelve recent Dutch court house projects have been privately developed, and let to the state for fixed periods, after which it is possible that the developer will need to find more conventional, commercial tenants. Inevitably, as buildings have become less functionally specific, potentially reverting to use as rented offices after only 10 years, their meaning has become more ambiguous.

Just as the contemporary court programme contains intrinsic conflicts, so Middelburg's physical fabric presents unique challenges. A once important trading port in Zeeland, Middelburg's historic centre consists of mediaeval and seventeenth-century houses, two or three storeys high, built on uniform plots about five metres wide. To the south of the town, a flat suburban landscape is punctuated by scattered buildings, and crossed by major roads, a railway line and a wide, modern canal. Middelburg's court completes a series of large public buildings, constructed on a peninsula, flanked by two canals, separating these two contrasting environments. The two neighbouring projects, a public library dating from the early 1980s and a more recent tax office, look directly across the fourteenth-century Binnenhaven canal towards Middelburg's historic urban fabric, yet are of an alien scale, and fail to respect the geometry of the eighteenth-century canal bank.

The symbolic and contextual dimensions of Middelburg's recently completed law court have not escaped its architect, Hubert-Jan Henket. Far from being sentimental, Henket's work is firmly rooted in twentieth-century Dutch Modernism. A student of Aldo van Eyck, Henket is now a key member of DoCoMoMo, the international group set up to preserve Europe's heritage of Modernist buildings. Once closely allied to more technologically inspired designers like Benthem and Crouwel and CEPEZED, Henket's architecture has become softer and more inclusive, but remains rigorous.

At both strategic and detailed levels, the Middelburg court design derives from the architect's analysis of brief and context. The building's perimeter faithfully follows the site boundary (as its neighbours failed to do), enjoying the irregularities of the historic canal bank and adjoining locks. The colonnaded facade, picking up the town's characteristic five-metre rhythm, is limited to 12 metres in height, and is capped by a spectacularly oversailing canopy, protecting the southern side of the building from the midday sun.

Strategically, the building has a bulbous head, at its eastern end, containing the most specialised spaces, including the courtrooms and prisoners' cells. The more repetitive offices and meeting rooms - making up about 70 per cent of the floor area - are arranged around an elevated courtyard. The nature of these spaces is suggested by the facades: regularly gridded, warm yellow render for the offices, and grey tiles, with solar-shaded fenetres a longueur wrapping round the public courtrooms. All windows are of silver grey aluminium, consistent with the compositional restraint of the design. Henket has succeeded in his aim of producing a building 'radiating distinction rather than status'.

The most impressive and complex interior space is the entrance foyer, which separates the offices from the courtroom block. The foyer's primary axis runs between a pedestrian entrance at the southern end-linked to Middelburg's town centre by a new footbridge across the Binnenhaven - and doors serving a vehicular drop-off point on the busy road to the north. The vast majority of staff and visitors enter the courts through this space, from which the building's diverse functions are readily perceived. A grand staircase ascends to the east, directly overlooked by one courtroom, and leading to another two courts at its head. The layered, fracturing forms surrounding this stair face the court library, through which the office courtyard can be glimpsed to the west. Advocates, judges and detainees are excluded from this orientating space, however, as Ministry of Justice regulations require separate means of access to the courtrooms for each of these parties, somewhat complicating the building's hidden circulation network.

As previously published projects suggest (see the Boymans museum extension, AR July 1991, or the Wehl town hall, AR March 1993), Hubert-Jan Henket's architecture is not primarily generated by rhetorical or linguistic concerns, but is the product of tectonic pragmatism and systematic analyses. Nevertheless, at Middelburg, Henket saw the social and cultural importance of the project, and its relation to its complex physical context, as leading issues. The building's formal restraint - its deliberate ordinariness - is intended to make the law symbolically integral to the community it serves. The courtrooms themselves all have large windows, facing towards the public realm outside the building, or into the foyer at its heart, making the process literally transparent.