Court Room Furniture

Courts hold sittings — which demand chairs, for everyone except witnesses at least. Yet it’s surprising (okay: only mildly) how little attention gets paid to courtroom furniture, as if bums would be happy in any old seats. But if I were in London (England) right now, I’d be able to see how a couple of the world’s great architects tackled the problem.

First, however, a bit of background. After partition in India, half of Punjab went to Pakistan and the capital, Lahore, along with it. So the state and federal governments decided to construct a new, modern capital in Chandigarh, and chose architects Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, to design it, by and large. One of the buildings the pair had erected is the Palace of Justice, for which they designed the furniture. Whether or not the designed Chandigarh is a success is a matter of debate, most critics, perhaps, concluding that modernist “brutalism” was not the right choice for India. (You can get an Indian architect’s perspective here.)

Now back to the furniture. Evidently, after functioning for fifty years, the wooden furniture Le Corbusier designed became shabby and was tossed out. As luck would have it, London architect Richa Mukhia stumbled across it in a tip and rescued and restored it. Together with other Le Corbusier furniture from Chandigarh, It is currently on display at P3 in a re-created court room, pictured below. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Unfortunately the photographs can’t convey the most important aspects of the furniture — the texture, the details, and how it would be to use it. But they can remind us, even at this remove from the London exhibit, that law is practiced in a practical world of things, and that we should pay more attention than perhaps we do to the things that support us in our practice of law.