United States Courthouse Annex - Salt Lake City, Utah

The United States Courthouse Annex in Salt Lake City was completed in August 2014 to eliminate overcrowding in the  Frank E. Moss Courthouse, which opened in 1905 as the first  federal building in the Utah capital. Totaling 400,000 square feet, the annex includes 10 district and magistrate courtrooms, chambers for 16 judges, justice support functions, and other  federal agencies. 

The annex site comprises a gently rising city block bounded by  the west elevation of the landmark neoclassical courthouse. A public terrace levels that gradient and connects the buildings. In a gesture of bridging old and new, it is finished in Sierra Nevada granite that approximates the Moss courthouse’s stone cladding. 

The architecture of the United States Courthouse Annex similarly possesses continuity with its predecessor and departs from the past. Design Awards jurors cited the annex’s 10-story cubic shape as a classically inspired signifier of dignity and strength, for instance, yet they also observed how that volume contrasts the strong horizontality of the Moss courthouse. 

Another example is the glass facade that integrates the daily life  of the annex into the rhythms of the city, and which is mounted with extruded aluminum louvers to minimize glare and thermal gain. While the louvers evoke the fluted ornamentation on the Moss courthouse, they also produce a dynamic visual effect. Depending on time of day and weather conditions, the cube captures and reflects sunlight to seem bright white, steely gray, or largely transparent. Nor is this appearance uniform, as the louvers are widest where jury deliberation, judges’ circulation, and prisoner holding and movement take place, to shield them from public view. 

In the treatment of the louvers, the jury saw an overarching idea  at work: Whereas architects have traditionally revived historical styles to impart federal courthouses with authority, the United States Courthouse Annex design team employed daylight as a symbol of the fairness, transparency, and intellect of the nation’s  judiciary system. 

In turn, the team incorporated sunshine into every aspect of its work. Inside the annex, sunlight flows through the oak slats and glass treads of an impressive spiral staircase in the triple-height public lobby. A skylight placed over the building core additionally transforms the elevator lobby into a 200-foot-tall atrium, and this atrium contains a full-height art installation by James Carpenter Design Associates that siphons daylight into the space. And courtrooms are located at the corners of the building, so that natural illumination can both enhance the productivity of proceedings and symbolize the enlightenment of American justice. Jurors lauded the project for realizing the daylight concept at all scales of execution, calling the United States Courthouse Annex a model for contemporary judicial architecture and a step forward for the federal government. 

In Salt Lake City, light from the sun hovering just above the horizon, or even from streetlamps—can strike the clouds to awesome effect. When clouds’ crystals are flat and hexagonal, that ice will reflect the light rays perpendicularly. The resulting shafts of vertical illumination are known as light pillars, and their appearance over Utah's capital city captivates observers  without fail. 

For the United States Courthouse Annex, Suspended Light Pillars by James Carpenter Design Associates recreates this natural phenomenon under manmade conditions. Using eighth- inch-diameter rods, the interdisciplinary design firm suspended 432 hexagonal prisms in nine fields over the full height of the 200-foot elevator lobby. As sunshine penetrates the lobby’s skylight, nine mirrors installed directly underneath the aperture reflect light farther down the volume to hit the atrium floor at noon each day. In that process, the daylight strikes the hexagonal prisms’ metal surfaces, and some of this reflection possesses a sparkle or a blue tinge based on the exact finish of the corresponding prism, prompting building users to look for the source of the variation. 

Unanimously and without hesitation, the 2016 GSA Design Awards jurors agreed that Suspended Light Pillars beautifully integrates art and architecture. The installation is deeply respectful of the local landscape, and of the United States Courthouse Annex’s underlying design concept of expressing light as a symbol of American justice. Like the building itself, the artwork channels daylight into the facility’s interior while also manipulating it to poetic effect.