An open international competition was held in 1997 for a court that had been created two years earlier and had nowhere to sit. More than five hundred entries were judged by a panel chaired by Charles Correa, and in 1998 the commission went to Janina Masojada, Andrew Makin and Erik Orts-Hansen of OMM Design Workshop in Durban with Paul Wygers of Urban Solutions in Johannesburg. Their proposition was that justice in an African setting is done under a tree, so the chamber is roofed on slender canted columns rather than ringed by a colonnade, and daylight comes in low at street level so that people outside can see feet and be seen. The site was the Old Fort prison. The Awaiting Trial Block was taken down to clear it and its bricks were built back into the walls and the stair. The court was inaugurated on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2004.
The court stands inside the Old Fort prison complex, where the Number Four section held Black male prisoners, many of them arrested under the pass laws, and the Women’s Gaol held women; Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Luthuli, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Nelson Mandela were all detained on the site. Building the court required demolishing the Awaiting Trial Block, and its bricks were reused in the new walls and stair so that the prison would remain physically present in what replaced it. The court was created by the constitutional settlement that ended apartheid, and it opened on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2004 — the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.
Wikidata Q1133886 · Commons: File:Constitutional Court (outside) of South Africa.JPG · Photo: Mihi tr · Licence: CC BY 4.0