2017 - Harrisburg, PA, USA
Harrisburg U.S. Courthouse
Harrisburg, PA, USA
CLIENT United States Courthouse / STATUS Under Design 2017 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates /EnneadArchitects LLP
The landscape for the United States Courthouse in Harrisburg can be seen as a vessel for judicial functions, and also as a cultural eventscape that reinvigorates part of the city. The project creates a bold new highly articulated topographic surface that acts as a device mediating between building and site and site and surrounding urban environment. The landscape for the Federal Courthouse helps to synthesize and merge these environments. It aspires to create a new civic vision for the future of Harrisburg while recalling many of the regional and historical aspects of the city: the topography of the Blue Mountain escarpment, geological maps of the region, and the sinuous forms of the adjacent rail yard. The landscape of the courthouse, like the city itself, is borne out of an array of ideas that begin to overlap and intertwine forming a composite that contains traces of the past while providing a new civic future for Harrisburg.