Multi-Use Facilities

A former parochial school was converted into the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. The building’s owners wanted a multi-use building because they liked the idea of grouping specialized services into one facility.

Many communities view multi-use facilities as the consummate justice facility building type. In most cases, voters need only pass one bond to fund design and construction, find one site on which to build, and when the project is finished, the community has a new courthouse, jail or detention center, and offices for justice-related services. Often times the buildings house the police and a 911 emergency call center, as well.
While it’s easy to create a long list of advantages offered by a multi-use building, the concept does not work for all communities or for all justice tasks and the buildings need to be properly planned in order to function efficiently and securely.

Security is probably the biggest issue when planning a multi-use facility. The federal government, according to Gary Mote, spokesperson for the General Services Administration in Atlanta, is moving away from mixed-use or multi-use buildings because of heightened security needs. The levels of security required for federal courthouses are much higher than for other agencies and it no longer makes sense to put them in the same building.

With federal courthouse construction once again picking up-Mote says the southeast region where he works is building four to five federal courthouses, more than any other region-many new federal facilities will not be multi-use types.

Michael Cox, partner in charge of justice design at Wold Architects and Engineers in St. Paul, Minnesota, understands the government’s position, but says he doesn’t see other people moving away from the building type. He says the buildings are very successful when the right user groups share the space to create efficiencies. But, Cox sees the GSA’s change to discrete federal courthouses as a positive move for the government, which often had more offices than courtrooms in its court buildings. And a lot of the user groups did not fit together, Cox says. Mote agrees, saying that the new federal courthouse buildings will be smaller-and therefore less expensive-than those previously constructed, and the agencies within the buildings will be support services for the court. The buildings also will change aesthetically, says Mote, with the 100-foot setbacks-now required for new courthouses-opening up opportunities to create public spaces that make the buildings less intimidating. Mote said the facilities will not project a “bunker mentality.”

Cox also is wary of the way some people misinterpret the notion of mixed-use buildings, designing massive structures where all functions and faculties are under one roof, creating what he referred to as a “dubious building type.” According to Cox, multi-use does not mean one building and he is not a fan of putting jails and courts under the same roof. “You need to have two individual buildings because there has to be the appearance that one is separate from the other. Interconnected, but not the same.”
The Goodhue County Justice Center he recently completed in Red Wing, Minn., is actually several buildings in a campus setting, but connected underground. That way, the buildings function as individual structures but were built with the same components and parts to take advantages of the economies of scale. The separation also allows security levels to be tailored to the needs of each component, adjusting for higher security for the courthouse and jail portions.

Buildings on the Goodhue County Justice Center campus in Red Wing, Minn., are connected underground. The buildings function as individual structures but are built with the same components and parts to take advantages of economies of scale.

Separating user groups is as important as separating functions. Mote classifies user groups into one of three categories: general public who stream in and out of the building, personnel who work in the building, and prisoners awaiting trial or those already adjudicated. Creating unique circulation paths for all three user groups is key to the success of any multi-use building. At Goodhue, as with most public/private justice facilities, Cox designed the main entrance for public use, while inside, he “layered” the different corridors serving the public, building staff, and prisoners so there is no opportunity for the groups to ever cross paths.

Creating a clean-sheet design more easily allows for those large setbacks, staggered hallways, and campus settings with secure, underground connections, but planning a multi-use building becomes more complicated when reusing existing structures.

Architect Alta Indelman recently faced those challenges when converting an old 1908 parochial school into the Red Hook Community Justice Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. “We get the real estate we get, and we work with it,” says Indelman. “With a certain amount of creativity, you can adapt any building.”

The old school building lent itself perfectly to use as a justice center-although the architect admits it’s a little tight on space-and the separate, secure traffic zones and circulation patterns were created and other security features were added. The facility, however, is not a high-security building in the manner of courthouses built by the GSA, but is instead designed to be an “approachable court.”

The building has only one courtroom but houses all the services that support the court’s mission to rehabilitate and break the cycles of crime. Indelman points out that crimes are more “quality of life” than criminal.

The building’s owners, the New York State Unified Court System in partnership with The Fund for the City of New York’s Center for Court Innovation, actually pushed the idea of a multi-use facility. They felt that the building type-which groups specialized services-promotes rehabilitation.