That’s an Underhill photo above, of the rotunda at the interior of the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey. Here’s a HABS photo of the exterior:
It is, as you may have noticed, a massive Beaux Arts building, constructed shortly after 1900, while the full effect of the classical-architectural revival kick-started by the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was still present. It was originally the location of most of the county government, but as with so many civic buildings of that era, it gradually became to be seen as useless: impractical as office space, and expensive and difficult to maintain. It came reasonably close to being demolished but has been restored and is, amazingly enough, now home to some court space and county offices.
In the light of recent news, it’s worth spending a minute on what this design meant and means. The courthouse was designed in this style because, simply, that’s what you did in 1906. If it had been built in 1890, it would have been in a different historicist revival style. The big rotunda and the heavily-decorated interior and exterior were also a way for Hudson County, directly across the river from New York, to make a statement about its self-worth. The “wasted space” of the rotunda was meant to give an impression, and it did. Rooms like that still do. But the impression, it seems to me, is a function of the design of the space itself as much as the surface decoration. There are modernist atriums that have the same awe-inspiring effect: the recent restoration of the Ford Foundation building shows that. The argument that Beaux Arts design represents hundreds (or thousands) of years of history ignores the fact that the vast majority of people who see this building have never seen the European precedents and therefore now about that architectural history – if they know about it all – through local monuments like this. In other words, saying that this style is the correct one for an important civic building forces you into circular logic, where this style is important here because of precedents that people know are important because they see the modern buildings here.
That said, I love this building and Jersey City, which has suffered from a lot of poor urban planning and bad architecture, is better for having it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.