Orange County Courthouse

Orange County Courthouse

The courthouse was one of a number of civic structures planned for Orange County, including a library and city hall in addition to the completed two-storey police headquarters. For this project Neutra’s “client interrogations” reached a new level. He interviewed bailiffs and judges, clerks and guards, district attorneys and public defenders, generating a wealth of planning information to ascertain the simultaneous needs of a freely moving public as well as those of prisoners under guard. The result is a handsomely detailed building, if somewhat formulaically handled. The narrow twelve-storey tower is oriented north-south, with a massive order of fixed vertical louvers for “skyglare” on the north and broader movable louvers on the south rising up behind a “base” of a secondary two-storey court building, this fronted by larger louvers. The staircase on the east is treated like a “server” element à la Louis Kahn, articulated in white and slightly pulled away from the building.