Pleasures of Lawyering: Attractive Courthouses

If your weblog reading is limited to the world of law or insurance or such, then you may be unaware of 2blowhards.com, one of the jewels of the cultural weblogging universe.  The assembled Blowhards provide this self-description of their site:

In which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy educations.

Earlier this month, the site's pseudonymous co-founder Michael Blowhard put up a lengthy post on the subject of "revival" styles of architecture, e.g., Gothic Revival, Greek Revival, and so on.  Well down into that post -- just keep scrolling past the Houses of Parliament -- Michael B. offers up one of the little-known joys of practicing law in Southern California, the Santa Barbara County courthouse:

Much of Santa Barbara was wiped in a 1925 earthquake.  The new courthouse was designed by the San Francisco architect William Mooser III in the then-popular Spanish Revival Style.  There's very little that's "authentic" about the Santa Barbara County Courthouse.  It isn't faithful to actual Mission originals; it's really a fantasia on Spanish-colonial and Moorish styles.  The building's famous murals were painted by Dan Sayre Groesbeck, who'd made a living doing set designs for Cecil B. DeMille.  The building isn't even made of adobe; it's constructed of concrete, covered with something-or-other.

Yet who cares?  The building is beautiful, functional, and popular; it's often referred to as one of the most beautiful public buildings in the U.S., and it has been admired and enjoyed since the day it opened.  As a piece of public-showpiece architecture, it's an achievement at least as impressive as [Frank] Gehry's hyper-chic Bilbao museum.

My practice takes me on occasion to the Santa Barbara courthouse, and when it does I try to arrive early so as to have time to stroll about and simply enjoy the experience of a genuinely lovely building.  Unfortunately, most of my firm's cases in Santa Barbara County are venued to the north in Santa Maria, where the court buildings -- scene, as revealed by this Google Image Search, of a certain recent high-profile criminal trial -- are as dreary as Santa Barbara proper's is sublime.

Santa Barbara.com devotes several pages to the Courthouse, including a photo gallery and a series of short films showing off its charms.  Real devotees can browse through the many resources on the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Official Website, which also features pictures, plans, and information on such topics as the current court building's predecessor, destroyed in that 1925 earthquake.  Don't miss the imposing Jail Wing and the admonition inscribed on its sandstone buttresses:  DIS CITE JUSTITIAM MONITI [“Learn Justice From This Warning”].

One practical tip should be mentioned if you plan to visit the Courthouse: try not to do it on a cold winter morning.  The building is unusual in that the hallways outside of all of the courtrooms open directly, through attractive Spanish-style archways, on to the central lawn and gardens.  They are lovely to look at any time of the year, but the archways that allow the visitor to see out also allow the weather to come directly in.  While Santa Barbara is the preeminent example of Southern California's vaunted Mediterranean climate, mornings this time of the year and on into January and February can be distinctly nippy and I, for one, find it less than pleasant to try to do justice with cold hands.