SANTA BARBARA COUNTY COURTHOUSE - UPGRADE AND MASTERPLAN
Santa Barbara, California 1987
The Santa Barbara County Courthouse is a masterful design in which landscape and buildings together describe a series of indoor and outdoor spaces of civic character and scale which are the focus of community activity year round. Campbell and Campbell was asked to assist in bringing the site to present-day access and energy code requirements, and to prepare a masterplan for further landscape construction and maintenance which respects the legacy of this extraordinary work. To this end, we thoroughly investigated the original landscape construction documents by Ralph Stevens, Elmer Awl and Henry Bauerschmidt; and we worked together with the County staff and public design review agencies to incorporate their concerns. We then developed a masterplan and executed a design which reinforces, builds upon and reinvigorates the original scheme while integrating contemporary concerns and requirements.