Chapter Eight: A Building and Litigation Boom in Twentieth-Century Federal Courts

“Three agencies—the Judicial Conference of the United States with its Administrative Office (AO); the General Services Administration (GSA) with its subdivisions, the Public Buildings Service and the Art-in-Architecture Program; and the National Endowment for the Arts—come to the fore as they cooperated and competed for authority and for dollars to shape representations of the federal government and its justice.”

Institutional Girth: In-House Administration, Research, and a Corporate Voice

  • William Howard Taft’s Innovations
  • Building the Administrative Apparatus
  • “Court Quarters”

Putting Cases into Courts: the Second Reconstruction

  • Rights across the Board
  • From a Three-Story Courthouse in Grand Forks to Twenty-Eight Floors in St. Louis and 760,000 Square Feet in Boston
  • Housing the Corporate Judiciary

Redesigning Federal Buildings

  • The Peripheral Role of “Fine Art”
  • John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Government Space: The 1960s Guiding Principles
  • Inelegant Design: The National Endowment for the Arts as Architectural Critic
  • Subsequent Precepts: Preservation, Conservation, Accessibility, Sociability, and Security
  • GSA’s Design Excellence Program