Reimagining the City
The U.S. Federal Building & Courthouse
___________
April 1st, 2018
In April, Tropic Magazine invited Cadence to participate in a design charrette to reimagine the U.S. Federal Building & Courthouse located in the City of Fort Lauderdale. The brutalist-style architecture and public plaza was designed by William Morgan Architects and Stresau, Smith and Stresau Landscape Architects and constructed by Henry C. Beck Company in 1979.
Reimagining the City // What Happens Next?
By Sybil Robert
Tropic Magazine, April 2018
The prospect of a new courthouse begs the question, ‘What do we do with Morgan’s masterpiece?’ While many of us don’t see the beauty, there is no doubt that the courthouse is indeed our town square. One need only look at the fact that the first manifestation of the youth movement for gun control borne of a hor-rible event in a distant corner of our county, hap-pened right here. The courthouse is significant for its architecture and for the stage it provided for this event, if not for all the others that have occurred here.
Tropic invites you to come along as we ask some of our best and brightest design visionaries to reimag-ine this modernist agora for the present and the fu-ture. What does it want to be? How can its functions, its connections, change to best meet needs of a drastically morphing downtown… one that is now filled with residents as well as office workers. The designers have been given free-reign for a no-holds-barred design charrette, to take what they feel is the best of the building and use it as the jumping off point, creating what might just be their own con-tribution to the phoenix rising on the New River.
