When the new Manhattan Criminal Court building at 100 Centre Street was inaugurated in 1941, one architectural critic rued that the modernist skyscraper was elusive and “uncommunicative.” Almost three-quarters of a century later, those criticisms could be leveled a thousandfold. It’s not the façade; the spaces and processes housed inside the seventeen-story building can be inscrutable. The passage of time, the astronomical growth in the volume of cases handled, and new security requirements have made for an experience that is disorienting and frustrating, to say the least, for the hundreds of thousands of people who come through the doors of the court — the city’s busiest — each year.
