Lloyd D. George United States Courthouse - Las Vegas, Nevada
According to the jurors of the 2016 GSA Design Awards, the Lloyd D. George United States Courthouse is a milestone in the recent history of design both repositioning GSA as a champion of contemporary architecture and shifting architects’ mindset about what was possible in judicial buildings.
The 437,000-square-foot courthouse, which is home to the United States District Court for the District of Nevada, was completed on the edge of downtown Las Vegas in June 2000. Its distance from the city’s famous Strip is psychic as much as physical, as the project team eschewed historical tropes for a radical reinterpretation of the American courthouse. In particular, the 8-story building substitutes the traditional colonnade with an enormous steel-and-aluminum canopy supported by a single, 175-foot-tall column: The gesture broadcasts the permanence of justice, while shading a raised plaza that also reinvents the processional staircase. Important interiors are expressed outside the courthouse, as well. The rotunda is a freestanding limestone cylinder whose cable truss supported glass dome measures 60 feet in diameter, and the jury assembly room is a separate plaza-level volume.
In addition to possessing a formal originality that continues to inspire architects, jurors remarked that the George courthouse has increasingly benefited the public over time, effortlessly hosting school groups and city events and providing space for gathering and protest as an alternative to the commercial grounds of The Strip. The 10 Year Award acknowledges both the courthouse’s transformation of the design professions and its strengthening of civic life in Las Vegas.
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