Monument to Judicial Supremacy and Globalism in Boston Built With Federal Taxpayer Dollars

Innovations on Socialist Architecture: The New U.S. Federal Courthouse as "Globalist Realism"

The new Federal Courthouse in Boston is the building many joke about. Office-workers in downtown Boston must live with it everyday, as they look down upon its strange-looking structure from high office windows. Many are utterly repulsed by its shape and ugly red-brick facade. Without that facade, that is, stripped to its basic shape and form (imagine it with basic white concrete for the purposes of this exercise), the building is unmistakably Stalinist in design. The only pleasing view of it is from its cafeteria, from where one can marvel at a spectacular view of the Boston skyline without having to look at the building itself. Take a peek yourself at the Court’s official web site http://www.mad.uscourts.gov/default2.html.

What many Bostonians would be surprised to learn is that the building’s design has explicit political objectives. That ugliness has a purpose. That is, beyond the obvious point of symbolizing Federal power, the justices overseeing the project, architects, building’s construction managers (the General Services Administration [GSA]), and even the contributor of integral art work for the facility all had overt intentions to construct a building that would stand as a political "construct"/object and emotional inspiration. That much is obvious. However, all of those involved in its construction have been curiously silent or opaque about exactly what it is all supposed to symbolize. Here, through an analysis of the design, landscape, and art commissioned for the interior by the GSA, it is possible to see plainly that the new Federal Courthouse, which was dedicated in 2001 to the former radical Left-wing MA Congressman John Joseph Moakley, symbolizes an abstract "Suprematist" (anti-objectivist and emotional) rejection of all prior cultural forms and representations in favor of a new globalized order based on multi-cultural and socialist revolutionary ideals. Indeed, even a cursory look at the building’s basic design reveals that it not only borrows heavily from Bolshevik "socialist realism" and Soviet architecture, but looks very much (quite by accident one hopes) like a stylized hammer and sickle! It is the premier example of a new school of radical building design that I will call "Globalist Realism."

The Federal Courthouse in Boston was originally conceived during the mid-1990s to be the first of a wave of new Federal courthouses. The project in Boston was overseen by U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Stephen G. Breyer, whose political ambitions were displayed for the world to see in his April 2003 speech before the American Society of International Law in which he declared the start of a new revolution – from above, by promoting the doctrine of "comparativism." Comparativists engage in open sedition by proclaiming the impossible in any sovereign nation under a rule of law – the readiness of justices to pick and choose whatever non-treaty foreign agreement, law, or court opinion they need to create the illusion of a "precedent" or "practice" upon which to decide a case. In that speech, Justice Breyer even went so far as to draw a direct analogy to the French Revolution! Welcome to the Comparativist Revolution in the Federal Courts. For every revolution there must be monuments. Lawrence v. Texas was the first strike in this War of the Robes launched by Breyer and fellow left-wing internationalists. It was a decision that included references to foreign non-ratified treaties, laws, and judicial decisions as key foundations. More historic than its implications for the gay agenda, which will be rolled back eventually, was Justice Antonin Scalia’s attack on Breyer’s agenda (and others who support Breyer, including Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor, who have since "outed" themselves, while Justices Stevens, Souter, and Kennedy have remained quiet while citing foreign laws in various decisions issued since 2002). Scalia noted in his dissent that the decision, and the manner in which it was decided, would augur a period of great social "disruption." More recently, Scalia has declared publicly that "living constitution" judges are threatening to destroy the constitutional order in these United States.

The campaign to promote a globalist "humanist" and reformed socialist world order, which started with radical Marxist-Liberalism in the United States and post-1960s Western Europe, was translated into Mikhail Gorbachev’s "new thinking" and then former President Bill Clinton’s (with British Christian Socialist Tony Blair) "Third Way" program (that is, between Leninist socialism and capitalism, but in fact, Marxist in character and form). In international law, the internationalist/globalist war to overturn sovereignty-based law was formally launched in July 2002 with the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which is not a war crimes court, as some propagandists have sought to portray (the ICC did not replace war crimes tribunals in the Hague or any existing international legal or arbitration institution for that matter), but an organization explicitly designed to assert a sovereign/criminal power that passes through states to regulate the behavior of individuals. That is, the ICC is the founding institution of a new world government, complete with a jurisdictional claim that is explicitly open-ended in terms of its potential.

In Boston, this "War of the Robes," which has been largely conducted in the shadows of judges’ chambers, came in the form of a thunder-clap from a naturalized South African Leftist sitting as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In Goodridge (Nov. 2003), which was a stage-managed exercise organized by a friend of Chief Justice Marshall, three justices from the SJC joined her in first asserting a power they don’t have (as stated by other justices issuing a dissent in the case), namely to define what the state’s or people’s "interests" are, then applied some socialist realism to "re-imagine" what the common law definition of marriage was, and finally cited a recently issued Ontario Appeals Court decision to craft the remedy – of gay marriage. "Comparativism" and globalism at work – and used by Radicals to promote anarchy and "disruption" of the legal and social order here in the United States.

Breyer’s local counterpart, as overseer of the design and project, was Judge Douglas P. Woodlock. This is the same Judge Woodlock, who, when placed into the position of defending the First Amendment at the time of the Democratic National Convention in Boston in July 2004, sided with the forces of socialist tyranny. While publicly decrying the fenced in and razor-wire surrounded "speech camp" for conservative, anti-abortion, and other protesters at the DNC as a "concentration camp," Judge Woodlock ultimately sided with the Bush Administration (after an ex parte meeting with an Assistant USDA) to accede to their request to create the intolerable and foolhardy "speech zone." In the end, while the Judge allowed only a Communist/Anarchist group to parade freely in the streets, conservatives and anti-abortion protestors were sent to the concentration camp. Still, when push came to shove – literally, none of the Boston police actually enforced the ridiculous regulations.

The Architects of the Courthouse were Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. That’s the same I.M. Pei who gained fame and notoriety for his creation of a glass pyramid (based on the Egyptian pyramid at Giza) at the entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris. At the time, France’s Socialist Prime Minister, Francois Mitterand, had intended the reconstructed Louvre to be the centerpiece of a "grand" building program intended to promote socialist values (including a hideous large futuristic arch to contrast with the Arc de Triomphe and the infamous upgrade to the Pompidou Center, complete with "artsy" external plumbing). Mitterand hand-picked Pei, and his rehashed design (similar to a draft planned for the JFK Library, but shelved), against the wishes of most of his advisers and the popular outrage of many in France. He did so as a public statement about the "democratization" of Parisian institutions and French culture (that is, making it accessible to the "masses"). Mitterand’s Minister of Culture Jack Lang described it as a campaign to create the impression that "before us" there was "darkness" and "after us -- light." That is, Pei’s "Chinese Pyramid" was, to the Socialists of France, a symbol of a new socialist order. Since then, Pei and his firm have been well-known for projects in China (including the diamond-window encrusted Xiangshan Hotel at Fragrant Hills), Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S. especially.

While Pei is the headliner in the firm, much of the design work is conducted by principals and assistants. In this case, the principal designers were co-founder Henry N. Cobb and a South African named Ian Bader. Cobb, who was born in Boston and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Paris (for six years studying art), was a founding partner of the firm, and worked with Pei on the infamous and problem-plagued John Hancock Tower in Boston (1976). During the early 1980s he was also Chairman of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is said to be currently working on the United States Courthouse in Hammond, Indiana and the Center for Government and International Studies at Harvard University. However, the firm’s web site implies that Bader did most of the legwork.

Cobb’s objective behind the courthouse in Boston? He laid it out in a quote on the discoveringjustice.org site section dedicated to this "symbolic building":"...the decision to build the new U.S. Courthouse...was a command to give voice, through architecture, to those aspirations and beliefs that underlie the American system of jurisprudence. Among these none seems more fundamental or more deserving of vigorous reaffirmation than the principle that every citizen shall have equal access to the law and to the guarantee of due process embodied in an independent judiciary. To assert this principle--that the courts are open to all--therefore became the first goal motivating the design of the new courthouse…Finally, we seek to embody in this courthouse those qualities that most notably characterize the judicial proceedings it will house: probity, clarity, restraint and respect for precedent joined with responsiveness to ever-changing societal needs." Justice Breyer is also quoted on the same site as declaring that:"It does not belong to the federal government. It does not belong to the litigants. It belongs to the public. And if the public cannot use this site and see it as theirs…" Having said that, it is all the more curious that the entire building was designed to create entirely separate hallways for judges – their own secret passageways, ostensibly for "security," but inadvertently symbolizing clearly the shadowy "Olympian" (quoting Robert Bork), conspiratorial (the District Court judges in Boston have been called a "Star Chamber" by some practicing in the Federal Courts), and "Supremacist" (Phylis Schlafly) nature of the Federal judiciary today.

Of course, the money it took to build this "symbol," if added onto existing fee structures, could have paid for truly competent and zealous lawyers for many tens of thousands of defendants (over 2 decades) cycling through the building. Now that would be "equal access to the law!" Instead, while the elites build monuments to their own greed and "grand" designs, the District Court’s "CJA" list of attorneys purportedly available for appointments is an utter sham – dominated by people who won’t take appointments except for very rare (in MA) capital cases (where the fee structures are much higher). This "culture" of rejecting the spirit of the BAR (acting with "zeal" and public purpose through pro bono and appointed work) and John Adams (the state’s most famous lawyer ever, who rose to defend the soldiers behind the Boston Massacre of 1770) has thrived partly due to the fact that most lawyers practicing in the District Court must also operate in a state that has one of the lowest rates of payment for appointed legal representation in the country. The result has been that Boston has a very low ratio of practicing criminal defense attorneys vs. case loads – the low pay scales have driven them out. The Commonwealth has even faced informal "strikes" by lawyers over the pay rates that have forced the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to step in to order Courts to either find representation for defendants in a timely manner or let pre-trial detainees go free (and many were in 2004).

Here then is a building constructed to symbolize not the rule of law, but to symbolize that the law "belongs to the public" with "responsiveness to ever-changing societal needs." This is the progressive internationalist and socialist/"Liberal" activist vision formalized in architecture. That is, the judicial system itself, rather than merely serving as the third branch of our republican government, is trying to re-position itself under Radical control as a "democratic" institution in American society. As such, the sometimes lawless decrees and law-making from the bench that have come to polarize American society since the 1960s are pretended to be based on responses to "societal needs." Representative governments are supposed to have that responsibility. Courts are supposed to stick to arbitration and dispute resolution, not make up law for the masses as they go along. Ah, but try telling that to the new "Olympians," as Robert Bork has called them.

Getting back to the design team, Bader’s "key involvement in the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse" is trumpeted by the firm. Indeed, it is curious to find that the design of the Courthouse is somewhat of a rehash of (or vice-versa) a building designed by Pei and Bader at the prep school Choate Rosemary Hall (complete with a scaled down version of the glass wall and familiar-looking facade). Bader reportedly took his experience with the Federal Courthouse in Boston and parlayed that into design partner roles for the Queens Family Court and City Agency Facility in Jamaica, NY, which Mayor Bloomberg dedicated in February, 2003, the United States Courthouse in Hammond, Indiana, and the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, NY.

In the end, whether by design (overt or surreptitious by a participant) or coincidence, this Breyer Pei Cobb Bader designed building ended up taking on many of the characteristics of building designs previously pioneered by such Bolshevik architects as Konstantin Melnikov, the Vesnin brothers, and Vladimir Tatlin. For those without access to Soviet era publications on Soviet architecture, a few examples of the style of Melnikov (vaguely similar to the Courthouse) can be found by searching the web, among them the Sucharev Administration Building in Moscow (1924), the Kauchuk Workers Club in Moscow (1927) and interiors of the Soviet Pavillion for the Paris expo of 1925 that many art students in Paris often gain familiarity with. Indeed, the Federal Courthouse in Boston looks very much like a blend of the first two buildings located in Moscow, and the Telegraph Building, which is also located there (a famous building in Russia, it is shown on a Soviet stamp dated 1947 [also shown on another stamp from 1930 that is Scott#436] – note the basic design concept of an L-shaped building with wings centered on a large recessed rotunda. The colonnade feature at the top of the Federal Courthouse is also remarkably similar to not just one, but many, Soviet buildings (see, e.g., the Sanatorium of the State Bank, shown on a Soviet stamp with the Scott #749, or the VCSPS No. 3 in Kislovodsk on Scott#1366). There are others in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, and other countries subjected to Stalinistic building sprees, that either remain today, or were destroyed in the war (and documented in Soviet era publications on architecture), that are comparable to the Courthouse in Boston. When one considers that several key design elements and approaches used in the new Courthouse are virtually unique here in the U.S., one has to ask was it really all just coincidence?

At the least, perhaps those behind this monstrosity might be ready to admit that the objectives of the building created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and architectural deja vu. Where is the Classicism common to many Federal Court buildings? Tossed away in this case, as so many Communist Bloc architects did during the Soviet experiment, in favor of gigantic monuments to "Constructivism" and socialist realism.

Where is the "modernism" promised by the GSA as part of this project? The interior of the building already looks like a tired school hall built in Russia back in the 1920s -- there can even be found row after row of childrens’ and amateur art strewn about to cover up the dull interior design. The artistic centerpiece of the facility is an overt throw-back to Malevich’s nearly century-old Suprematism on an Olympian scale. Perhaps Socialist Realism is becoming the new "Classicism" among architects utterly corrupted by decades of abstract rubbish masquerading as creative works (and hope that no one is left 40 years later to note how repetitive it is with the Bolshevik and Stalinist building sprees). The building seems quite fitting as a symbol of the "Olympian" project of Judicial Supremacy that the Federal judiciary is embarked on, as well as the general drift of America’s internationalist elites towards socialist culture (without, in most cases, even realizing the sources and origins of their ideas). While not necessarily guided by a common historical understanding of Russia’s experiences under Bolshevism decades ago, it is the fact that so many today are in a quest to promote a culture and system that meets Bolshevik objectives 2/3rds of the way (Former VP Al Gore even recently accused the Bush Administration of being "Orwellian," while precious few have resisted campaigns for "speech zones" and thought crime legislation and prosecutions under conspiracy and "hate" statutes) that has led to the emergence of so many policies, laws, and monuments that "converge" with socialism (carrying out Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a "new world order") – and threaten America with the prospect of repeating the 20th century’s nightmares. If that new world order is to have a seat of power for its judicial masters, then the Moakley Courthouse in Boston was designed expressly to fit the purpose.

By the way, Gorbachev continues to promote the New World Order vision first articulated by his adviser, Georgi Shakhnazarov, who introduced the phrase into Soviet communications in 1981, when he published The Coming World Order. Today, Gorbachev is a resident of the Presidio and gives speeches at "world forums," while Shakhnazarov is working with Carnegie in Russia. http://www.carnegie.ru/en/pubs/procontra/55953.htm. After publication of The Coming World Order in English (1984), this author observed a marked increase in its use in the West, and eventual adaptation for use in the speeches of former Secretary of State James Baker, who popularized it as a foreign policy goal of the first Bush Administration (1988-1992), and, of course, most infamously, President George H.W. Bush, who used it on Sept. 11, 1990 (coincidence?) while explaining how he had achieved success in his recent summit with Gorbachev in reaching a modus vivendi on the Middle East and Iraq. This theme of a "new world order" influenced decision-making in the early 1990s, when plans for a nation-wide modernization of Federal courthouses was first conceived.

Managing the Federal government’s own version of Mitterand’s grand projects is the General Services Administration or GSA. While America’s bridges, roads, and ports went to hell, Congress saw fit in the early 1990s to finance a massive and costly building program for the Federal judiciary involving some 160 courthouses. The agency's chief architect for the project was Ed Feiner, who oversaw courthouse program manager, Bill Guerin, and recruited architects like Cobb to the "Design Excellence" projects. At a 1999 GSA symposium, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated:

"Architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular age were."

Just in case the Federal Courthouse failed, through its pompous structural design, to evoke sympathy and recognition by elites "in-the-know" of the site’s aspirations, the GSA team recruited an artist to send a loud and clear message to anyone paying attention. Inside the central rotunda anchoring the building is part of an integral artwork created by Ellsworth Kelly, who is America’s foremost practitioner of a long deceased Russian art style called "Suprematism," which was pioneered by the Russian artist Kasimir S. Malevich (Russian, 1878-1935, famous for his odd, but significant, Black Squares [Kelly, in 1952, even emulated Malevich’s most famous works from 1923 and 1929]). Kelly, who went to school in Boston in the 1940s, is the last-remaining dean of this decaying "school" of art designed to be minimalist and abstract to the point of rejecting the notion that an artist’s canvas can capture true representations (in particular, of the subjectivity of "old" social and political constructs that may be "represented" through art), and thus embrace the rejection of existing cultures and, in some Russian interpretations, reason itself. Such work is hardly suitable for a Court of law, but then again, it is all so fitting for the District Courthouse in Boston, which is notorious for its judicial activism and proceedings that reflect a near complete disregard for the rule of law save for the barest pro forma procedures to mask a pervasive underlying intellectual corruption.

Suprematism and Constructivism, of the type pioneered by the Russians Malevich, Nathan Altman Ivan Kudryashov, and Vladimir Tatlin (collectively in the period 1914-1930), is art and architecture reduced to is most basic elements in order to impose, rather than fashion, "pure abstraction" as an expression of "pure" revolutionary spirit and emotion. This objective is reflected in the style’s reliance on "pure" abstract colors and plain "hard-edged" canvases without frames (that is, without borders, without social constraints and expectations, or "old" social "forms" and subjective demands on the artist, but also entirely with its own revolutionary set of "ordered" elements of construction). It is art to communicate "constructivist" realities, as reflected in the context in which the plain squares and geometric forms may be presented or used (for example, integrated into a building’s layout as a means of signaling the abstract and emotional purpose of the structure, that is, to transform the object that is a building into a rigidly planned emotional expression of a revolutionary desire). It is art signaling rejection of all "creative form," which in so doing opens up the viewer to consideration of the abstract signaling inherent to its constructive use. Some practitioners of this type of art are also wont to tell themselves, delude themselves, that somehow art that rejects impulsiveness and creativity actually reflects an "avante-garde" or techno-centric "futurism." Only Russian Bolsheviks could believe that – preposterously, as history records unequivocally.

Such art was suitable to capture the mood of revolutionary Russia (circa 1917), and was welcomed by Lenin as a means of promoting "socialist realism." That is, objectivity, spontaneity, impulsiveness, and realism were to be replaced with works designed to promote a "feeling" or "emotion" of revolutionary ardor, and planned conformity with it, for an abstract construction of a society directed towards a "Communist ideal." Indeed, Bolshevik propaganda art and posters from the 1920s and 1930s widely used the abstract geometric and single-colored shapes made popular by the "Suprematist" school. In this context, old Russia and Soviet hands might see the interior of the Rotunda of the "Moakley" Courthouse in Boston as the modern recreation of a Bolshevik propaganda poster.

For Kelley, commitment to the Suprematist ideal has meant a career built upon painting "hard-edged" canvases with only one color or using only simple splashes of color in minimalist representations. He is perhaps most well-known in this regard for his 1993 Memorial for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Although Kelly has studiously avoided any effort to promote his "art" as socialist realism, others from the "Hard Edge" school of geometric abstraction have been less circumspect about the political objectives behind a style that was embraced so strongly by the Bolsheviks.

For the new Federal Courthouse in Boston, Kelly and Cobb opted for a rotunda and various walls filled with "hard-edged" plain single-color canvases. The rotunda includes 12 solid panels in 9 colors (apparently for the 9 major ethnographic "regions" of the earth [see, for example, the nine regions and chapters contained in David Maybury-Lewis, et. al., People’s of the World: Their Cultures, Traditions, Their Way of Life (National Geographic, 2001)]) on large rectangular canvases that symbolize a revolutionary Suprematist ideal. The emotional point of the exercise, which is completely inappropriate for a U.S. Courthouse, is that all regions and races are participating in rejecting old social forms and objectivity to create an ordered "new world" (or New World Order) that is abstractly objectified by the large round glass ceiling. Pictures of the art can be found at http://www.discoveringjustice.org/courthouse/building.shtml. At the bottom of the rotunda, on the first floor, can be seen the representation of a compass. The glass ceiling, in turn, is surrounded, on the top of the building, by a strange-looking collonade (familiar to students of Soviet architecture) surrounding a glass cupola. Elsewhere in the building, there are 9 panels at the ends of six corridors corresponding by color to those in the rotunda (21 total throughout the building in 7 locations – representing the 7 "major" continents, and floors, of the building as a globe connected by the art to the rotunda’s emotional symbolism). The rotunda, with its admixture of colors and races from around the building and globe, thus symbolizes the use of law (or its corruption through "democratization" and activism) to manufacture a multi-cultural new world order. Finally, within the interior of the building one can also find Egyptian motifs in some of the courtrooms, perhaps carrying on the Pei tradition extending back to the Louvre’s pyramid.

Outside the building, in its ostentatiously presented "garden," are 9 carefully placed trees clearly intended to represent the various regions (and perhaps an "East" vs. "West" or "North" vs. "South" motif, since they are divided into two groups) atop a space shaped like a globe under a shadow (created/centered on a round entranceway). The entrance to that garden, while not visible on early design plans from Cobb, was constructed in a manner that creates a rounded entranceway at the end of a short hall. When incorporated into the building's overall design, and in particular its curved wings (look closely in a picture of the building at how the halls at the end of the V/L are curved), it creates the, perhaps unintended, impression of a stylistic hammer to the building’s sickle.

There you have it. Boston’s Federal Courthouse, which was created under the oversight of the leading self-proclaimed "comparativist" revolutionary Justice Stephen Breyer, is the beacon of a new Globalist Realist school of architecture and design. It was paid for by you, the taxpayer, and brought to you by New Left Clintonistas in Washington with the help of some of the world’s top experts in the "political art" of government architecture. At the heart of the building lies "Suprematist" art concentrated within a beautiful rotunda that evokes images of a Bolshevik-style propaganda poster or building project. It’s symbolic purpose? The abstract reduction, and destruction, of all the world’s cultures to form a new planned (Constructivist) society rooted in the revolutionary emotion or idea of a multi-cultural (multi-color) world unified in its advance towards the light (represented by the sun, via the glass circle at the top of the rotunda) of a new world order (the globe at the center of the rotunda [both at top, and at bottom – as marked by the compass]).

The words carved into stone at the bottom of the rotunda are from the late radical left-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. This is the same man who was revealed in the early 1980s, when certain correspondence of his was released, to have secretly helped [as in used as a cut-out] future Justice Felix "Red" Frankfurter in his defense of left-wing terrorists/anarchists, including the infamous Saccho and Vanzetti in Boston. Nevertheless, Brandeis’ words from 1914 are appropriate for this revelatory essay:

Oorah! At this point, we've got more than just the First Amendment at stake. None other than Justice Antonin Scalia is shouting to America that the constitution and the republic are at stake, and a period of profound "social disruption" has begun. He is at war with Breyer's self-proclaimed revolution from above via "comparativism" (Breyer literally describes what is happening as comparable to a global version of the French revolution).

Moreover, while few paid much attention, the Clintonistas in Justice (and there still MANY -- Bush never cleaned house like Clinton did in 1993) in league with the pro-torture AG and Card's Weldian Liberal RINOs that pepper this pseudo-conservative administration, have advanced a host of cases to build precedents for nothing less than the complete nullification of the U.S. 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments, and establish ARBITRARY and WANTON powers (the "tactics of totalitarianism" [Burke]) that sound "reasonable" for going after foreign invaders here in the U.S, but are actually starting to be used against Americans (and "right-wingers" the Left hates). People need to start following the trail of executive orders, administrative decrees and increasing use of "directives" (even by the Senate Judiciary Committee), case precedents, and so on. Those who actually do could care less about PATRIOT, because it is utterly trivial (even diversionary) in the context of a massive accelerating drive to accumulate wanton (lawless) powers and carve out arbitrary governmental "exceptions" to almost every law, procedural right, and constitutional right on the books.

From
http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/2004/11.02.04.html

Last Saturday, Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer and United States District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock joined Henry N. Cobb, FAIA, Bill Lacy, and Robert Campbell, FAIA, at the Center for Architecture to discuss the design and significance of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners' John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse and Harborpark in Boston. Harry Cobb spoke of the sequence of movement through the structure, and its interaction with the park and waterfront, criticizing the current model-based "Civic Spirit" exhibition in the Center for Architecture as being too concerned with buildings as objects. Justice Breyer talked as well of the importance of the court's civic function and siting – the Justices were most interested in a challenging site as well as serving as a catalyst for Boston redevelopment allowing truly public access to the South Boston waterfront.
Breyer said, "Above all is the public square – that works if there are people, it fails if there aren't." Judge Woodlock noted that "Architecture at its very best is a combination of memory and invention, speaking of the past and talking to the future, and doing the very best it can in the present." Woodlock stated that the public realm is now looked upon as "casual recreation and concerted consumption – Faneuil Hall," adding, "What it is that makes a city is confrontations that are unexpected, concentrated in a very small area." With expected panelist Ellsworth Kelly indisposed, Cobb said that his building "would be incomplete without Kelly's art" and that "we need to avoid statements in architecture as in art, and maybe in law as well, that may seem to be too definitive and too complete – the art and the architecture should need each other." The final words were from Justice Breyer: "What you have seen here show the changes that have taken place over a long period of time by people both inside and outside." In particular, the role of Ed Feiner, FAIA, and Marilyn Farley in creating GSA's Design Excellence program was specifically appreciated by the panelists who also noted that the Moakley Courthouse preceded and helped foster the creation of the program.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.