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(Photograph by Matthew Aungst) -
(Photograph by Tim Buchman)
A traffic circle leads to this enormous building of one hundred and forty thousand square feet. Its massive portico with four stylized and simplified full-height Doric columns supports a pediment adorned only with a large plain lunette. Under the portico a colonnaded porch forms a crescent in front of the building's long walls that are broken by pediments and emphasized by bands of cream-colored aggregate. Inside, long corridors open from the two-story lobby. Clearly the architect aimed at echoing Virginia's red brick classical courthouse tradition, but at this scale, that goal is almost impossible to achieve. Even this building was not large enough to serve the judicial needs of the growing county. In 2001, the eighty-three-thousand-square-foot Juvenile Courts building (Moseley Harris and McClintock) was added to the complex. This two-story building also is of red brick with contrasting white trim, but here a central pediment is flanked by projecting in antis entrances with the same simplified Doric columns that are framed by rectangular free-standing piers.