Seoul Eastern District Court A court is a place where the discipline and punishment as expounded by Michelle Foucault are constantly enforced. The designer’s dilemma for this project was to satisfy the two antinomic functions: the court’s essential function of punishment and the function of communication and openness. The authority of the judiciary comes from the trust of the people. Therefore, the goal of the project was to create a space conducive of promoting equality and communication based on trust and opening a new horizon of future-oriented judicial values.

Space Information

45,141Square meters
floor areas
+12 / -1Twelve stories and
one basement level
2017Project
Completion

The building consists largely of three masses: the court zone composed of criminal and civil courtrooms; the civil affairs zone consisting of offices for civil affairs and registry; and the office zone consisting of judges’ chambers, criminal affairs division, and civil affairs division. A large landscaped space and a square are arranged on the front and rear of the building to facilitate an atmosphere of communication with the surroundings and relieve the sense of pressure from the overwhelming mass. A court building inevitably needs to be organized in one large mass due to the court program, but this new building was designed to fit the human scale through segmented masses and concave and convex facade articulations.
As one of the facade and mass planning to add credibility to the image of the court, a pair of scales symbolizing equality and fairness was metaphorically expressed on the front facade of this new building. The civil affairs zone which is most frequently used by the public was planned to be approached both from the front and the rear to increase its accessibility. The court zone was planned so that the circulations of judges, employees, civil petitioners, defendants, and court spectators do not overlap, and the cores connecting the vertical circulations were also organized by areas.

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