by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

Let There Be Light

by Alex Marshal

HERE'S A good way to enjoy the new federal courthouse in Central Islip: wander.

Don't be intimidated by the X-ray machine and security guards just past the front door. The building is open to the public. Just sign in, hand over your cell phone and tell them you are sightseeing.

Designed by renowned architect ichard Meier along with The Spector Group of North Hills, the new federal courthouse, which will be dedicated today, is a classic modernist design, an interplay of light and air. It lacks cornice lines, Chippendale tops or statues of naked women to distract the viewer. It creates new shapes and spaces in an attempt to resurrect an old role for the courthouse as a central public building.

The courthouse, which has been in limited use since August, gives the federal judiciary here its first permanent home -- and badly needed space. But it also gives residents a grand public building to look at, argue about, experience and enjoy.

Built on budget for $190 million, the courthouse has 23 courtrooms with room to expand to 39 (the number projected to be needed on Long Island in 30 years). Its 860,000 square feet are contained in 12 stories built on a raised platform. It sits parallel to the Island, with the public hallways and courts facing the Great South Bay and Fire Island, and the judges' chambers and offices Long Island Sound.

Clad in white aluminum panels and surrounded by a concrete plaza and a 1,600-car parking lot, it's one of the tallest and biggest buildings on Long Island.

More importantly, though, it stands as a major contrast to the traditional courthouse.

Many older courthouses are beloved for the richness of their detailing. Nineteenth-Century courthouses often have a thick icing of granite columns and beaux arts ornamentation. Courthouses from the 1930s often have marvelous art deco touches, such as rounded corners and etched, stainless-steel doors. But however beautiful, these older courthouses are almost always dark and heavy, particularly from inside.

Meier's building is the contrary. It encourages sunlight and shadows to paint themselves on white walls amid grand spaces. Of course, some might contend that a witness at a murder trial or a recently bankrupted businessman might prefer dark, more anonymous spaces. But Meier believes the opposite.

"There's a lot of waiting around when you are involved with a trial, and a lot of trauma,' the 65-year- old architect said on a recent drive in his Jaguar out to the Island from his apartment on Manhattan's East Side. "I wanted to create an open space, with a view of the water, with light and air, so people have a place to go.'

The courthouse, although startling from a distance, is best experienced from inside, where the soul of the building comes out.

From the Southern State Parkway, the courthouse looks like a simple if not simplistic duo: a narrow, oblong box next to a lopsided, white silo. But from inside, the building reveals itself as a subtle composition of spaces hidden inside these two simple shapes. Halls, stairways and atriums cut along, across and through the main building, always bringing in the startling views of the treetops. The views of the Great South Bay, Fire Island and the tree-covered flat landscape are as much a part of the building as the courtrooms. On the upper floors, it's as if you are floating over the Island. Small, almost hidden balconies are sprinkled throughout the building, surprising the casual stroller with unexpected perches and views into and out of the complex.

Roaming the building's corridors is the best way to experience these subtleties.

Walk up to the ninth floor and peer down into the central silo from the small balcony that scoots around the inner face. Then take the small adjacent stairway down a floor and notice how the view cuts clean through the building. Notice how some hallways extend out from the building, providing double vistas of water and trees.

Both physically and functionally, the main building is like a sandwich standing on its side. On one side are the public hallways -- used by lawyers, clients and visitors -- which open onto courtrooms clad in white plaster and light maple paneling. A wall of glass lets in the sun and sky. On the other side of the sandwich, which faces the Sound, are the judges' chambers, rows of them. Federal District Court Judge Leonard Wexler, the "godfather' of the new courthouse, said he insisted on having the public side of the building face the Great South Bay, which most would argue is the prettier view. The judicial chambers connect to the courtrooms by rows of interior hallways.

In the center of the sandwich -- the filling, so to speak -- is the system for handling prisoners. Harsh, concrete jail cells and elevators to access them are set behind the wood panels of the courtrooms, invisible to the public. The white mesh on the jail cells matches that on the public balconies in the hallways -- an aesthetic point few prisoners will have the chance to appreciate.

Each part of this system -- the public hallways and courtrooms, the judges' chambers, the system for prisoner delivery -- has its own hallways, elevators and entrances. Neither a judge, a police officer with a prisoner nor a lawyer needs ever come into contact with the other unless by choice. The other component of the building, the lopsided round cylinder, has been compared to a grain silo and nuclear power plant reactor. Serving little practical purpose, it is the building's front door, or parlor. But it does provide the "wow' factor we associate with great public buildings. Classical buildings, like state capitols, are often composed around a large dome that sits over a vast column of space. What Meier has done is essentially move this vast column of space outside the building, where it sits in its own structure. At the same time, he has doubled the open space by constructing the main building around a rectangular atrium, which brings yet more light into the building.

"You go to any other federal courthouse, it's dark,' Wexler said, sitting in his chambers. "Here, you open up the door, and there's a burst of sunlight hitting you in the face,' added the judge, who allowed that he did not start out as a fan of modern architecture.

But this reordering of the traditional courthouse -- light instead of dark, empty spaces placed outside the building -- does not please everyone. On a recent afternoon, Bob Harlow, a lawyer, stared quizzically up at the balconies and white walls in the central, rectangular atrium.

"The interplay of light on the walls is stunning. But the bottom white wall is too much. It's flat and blah,' he said with a grimace.

A little later, three women walked in and stopped with a jolt once inside the first rotunda-like structure. "Wow,' said one of them. They drank in the space a few seconds. "It's too big, and too white,' said one of the women, who were eating in the building's cafeteria. The others nodded their heads. That's the gist of much of the criticism.

On a fourth-floor hallway, a white-haired guard confided that he liked the building at night, when it glows from within. "It's got many different personalities,' he said.

But while Meier plays with new shapes and spaces, the architect would like this courthouse with a new look to resurrect an old role: serving as a public space for people to gather and congregate, even if they aren't being sued or indicted. The exterior concrete plaza would serve this function, Meier said. "You could have a farmers' market in the plaza, or an art show,' he said. "It could be a community plaza. It's important for young people to have exposure to the courts.'

The challenge here is that people in the suburbs don't casually walk by the courthouse on their way to work or shopping, as people still do in functioning older towns and cities. People in the suburbs, like those of Long Island, drive places for specific purposes. The necessities of parking and highways isolate the new courthouse. Time will tell whether a suburban courthouse, even a grand one designed by Richard Meier, can play a public role in a physically fragmented, automobile-based region. Some might inquire how the federal government ended up producing an expansion of courthouse facilities on Long Island that doubles as a daring architectural statement.

The courthouse emerges from a new federal program called the Design Excellence Program, of the federal General Service Administration, the huge agency that manages most federal construction and real estate. Its aim is to have the finest architects build major federal buildings, from courthouses to office buildings.

It's changing the face of cities. New federal courthouses in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha, all designed by top architects, open in coming weeks. Meier also designed the new Phoenix courthouse. Edward Feiner, chief architect of the GSA, said the federal government is returning to a role it once had: expressing the best architecture of an era. "Federal buildings do not go away,' Feiner said from his Washington office. "They are around for generations. We felt this was a great opportunity to go back to what we used to do: designing high quality, landmark buildings.' Great buildings do not cost any more than mediocre ones, Feiner said. But choices are involved. The Islip courthouse came in on budget only after the GSA demanded that Meier and Spector cut some of the fancy trim from the original design.

For example, one might think the use of raw, unfinished concrete in the public plaza was an architectural statement, one often used by modernists. But Meier had intended to top the concrete with polished stone. A 12 percent, across-the-board budget cutback demanded by the GSA eliminated this amenity, along with others, Meier said. Absent, for example, are the rows of trees that would have softened the harsh parking lot and shaded the cars there in the summer.

But even without the polished granite, the courthouse is doing what Meier and Wexler intended: giving the courts a new home, and Long Island a dramatic public building.

Leaving the ground-floor elevators recently, two lawyers paused in the lopsided rotunda to give views on their new workplace. Richard Miller said all that empty air could be put to better use as more office space. But his colleague, Scott Mishkin, disagreed.

"When I go to the courtroom upstairs, I can see the Great South Bay and the trees,' Mishkin said. "It puts a kick in my steps. It makes me proud to be a part of the building.'

SIDEBAR MEIER: A Scientist at Heart

A SMOOTH WHITE building, devoid of cornices or cupolas, can be startling -- as the new federal courthouse designed by Richard Meier in Central Islip demonstrates.

But the architectural style it illustrates is three generations old. To many architects, it's as historical as the art deco chrome spire of the Chrysler Building, or the granite columns of the New York Public Library. Meier is one of the last modernists working today. He continues in this tradition proudly, still building clean, white buildings that lack eruptions.

"Until I see something better, I would say that modern architecture is the cutting edge of architecture,' Meier said in an interview in 1998. "It is architecture that has no historical baggage to it, that doesn't make references to things outside of itself, that deals with light and space.' Although he works in an older style, the 66-year-old architect is one of the superstars of the trade. He circles the globe with his fellow "name architects,' among them I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Michael Graves and Frank Gehry, touching down to build museums, airports and concert halls. Meier has been in this select group for two decades, roughly since he designed the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt in 1979. In 1984, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize -- considered the Nobel Prize of architecture -- at the relatively young age of 49.

But Meier entered an even more rare.fied, and difficult, realm with his selection that same year to design the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Known as "the commission of the century,' it is probably the largest arts-related construction project ever attempted at one time. Sitting atop a hillside overlooking Los Angeles like a contemporary Acropolis, the sprawling complex took 14 years to complete.

The final cost: a cool $1 billion. Battling the neighboring Brentwood civic league was probably as difficult as moving the earth and stone. But the Getty Center now attracts 1.8 million visitors a year, far beyond original projections.

Meier graduated from architecture school at Cornell University in the late 1950s, at a time when modernism was king. Victorian flourishes, art-deco swirls or any other types of "decoration' were out. Meier admired Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, one of the style's fathers. But the clean horizontal lines of Frank Lloyd Wright also were influential.

Meier's architectural career began in and around Long Island. One of his first independent commissions was a Connecticut house overlooking Long Island Sound. In it, one can see all the elements that would occupy his work for the coming three decades. Built in 1965-67, the house is a cube of glass, held together by white bands and white columns. A lone white brick chimney shoots up one side.

With the Getty Center complete now for several years, Meier, who is based in Manhattan and Los Angeles, is free to design federal courthouses and more art museums. In recent years, he has designed the Contemporary Arts museum in Barcelona, the Canal Plus headquarters in Paris, and the City Hall and Library in The Hague. He continues to receive and compete for prestigious commissions in the United States and abroad. In 1995, his new headquarters for Swissair opened in Melville.

Over time, Meier's simple white boxes have begun to swell and include curves, cylinders and other shapes. But they are still usually white, and they are still unquestionably modern. "White,' he writes in his book, "Richard Meier Architect, 1964/1984' (Rizzoli, 1984) "is, in fact, the color which intensifies the perception of all other hues that exist in natural light and in nature.'