| Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer for Bloomberg CityLab and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things. This week architects Elizabeth Diller and Annabelle Selldorf received the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal from New York’s Municipal Art Society. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  The pediment over the Supreme Court’s west portico, designed by artist Robert Ingersoll Aitken and executed by the Piccirilli Brothers. Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America Over the main entrance of the US Supreme Court building there is an inscription: “Equal Justice Under Law.” The phrase occupies pride of place on the pediment over the building’s west portico, the grand entrance hall to the court. Above the words stand several sculptures of the court’s guardians, historical and allegorical figures who embody its highest principles. At the center of this group is Liberty Enthroned, flanked by Order and Authority. These values are not as prominent as they once were. In 2010, under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court closed its western entrance to the public. No longer do citizens petition the court by climbing its 44 marble steps and entering through the towering Corinthian columns of the west portico. Since January, the entire structure has been hidden under scaffolding as workers install new lighting and clean the building’s facade.  Security gates, construction scaffolding and new procedures now prevent Supreme Court visitors from entering through the historic west entrance. Photographer: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg Though it may be veiled, the notion is still intriguing: “Equal Justice Under Law.” It speaks to a pledge that is as much a promise or an aspiration as a guarantee. It’s also a mystery: “Equal Justice Under Law” does not come from the Constitution. It does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. It’s close to sentences that appear in some late 19th-century cases about the 14th Amendment, but it’s not a direct quote. Its true author is unknown, according to former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy wrote an op-ed this week for the New York Times about the Supreme Court — not about its deference to the executive branch or the rise of the shadow docket, but to shed some light on an aesthetic intrigue. When the building was completed in 1935, Kennedy writes, a journalist complained to Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes about the pediment and its message. Justice shouldn’t have any condition placed on it, this interlocutor offered, blaming the judge for his grievance. Hughes’s clipped reply was as direct as the inscription: “Immediate judgment. Indictment quashed.” Kennedy writes that the inscription was probably the work of the building’s architect, Cass Gilbert, who was responsible for the Supreme Court and many other Gilded Age marvels. But Gilbert contracted the design of the west pediment to an artist, Robert Ingersoll Aitken. To execute it, Aitken in turn commissioned the Piccirillis — six Italian brothers (!) who carved some of the most important civic works of the 20th century, including the statue of President Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.  Cleaners work on sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken’s allegorical statue “Study the Past,” which stands outside the National Archives. Photographer: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images (“The Piccirillis are the Bronx climax of a distinguished family of Tuscans who, originally from Spain, worked in stone for two centuries around Carrara and Massa between the mountains and the sea, fought with Garibaldi and emigrated to Manhattan in 1888,” reads an immortal 1935 Time profile of the “masters of stone.”) In all likelihood, “Equal Justice Under Law” should be attributed to Gilbert (or to put a finer point on it, partners at Gilbert’s firm). Perhaps Aitken had a say in it — or maybe it was a judgment call by Furio, Tommaso or one of the other Piccirillis. The inscription is more than a slogan or aesthetic trivia. “Equal Justice Under Law” has been cited in court decision for decades. The pediment is the physical culmination of a dramatic procession up the court’s steps — “a carefully choreographed, climbing path that ultimately ends at the courtroom itself,” former Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a 2010 dissent about closing the building’s entrance. (That’s right — a formal court memo over building ops.) “To many members of the public, this Court’s main entrance and front steps are not only a means to, but also a metaphor for, access to the Court itself,” Breyer wrote. It matters that the people who enter the Supreme Court understand its message: petitioners, respondents, the public and above all, the justices. Perhaps one day, when the court reviews the decisions of the Roberts era, that choreography will be restored to its former glory. Design stories we’re writing |  A new pedestrian bridge designed by SHoP Architects crosses the Erie Canal in Brockport, NY. Photographer: Barrett Doherty The construction of the Erie Canal marked a turning point for the US. One of the nation’s first major public works, the 350-mile waterway transformed shipping in the Northeast and demonstrated the power of public bond financing. The canal also reshaped the cultures, economies and physical layouts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and other upstate New York cities. But its commercial heyday was brief, as shippers soon found other routes and the nation’s industrial centers moved south. Now 200 years old, the Erie Canal still possesses enormous potential — as an amenity and cultural catalyst. Teeing up new canal developments by SHoP Architects, Serweta Peck and more, Timothy A. Schuler explores the past, present and future of America’s great canal. Design stories we’re reading | Ellen Peirson writes a dispatch from the inaugural Copenhagen Architecture Biennial, whose theme is slowness. (The Architect’s Newspaper) Oliver Wainwright explores Donald Judd’s late-career turn as an architect through the lens of Judd’s remodeled projects in Marfa, Texas, and his glorious Peter Merian Haus in Basel, Switzerland. (The Guardian) Prefab bamboo houses designed by Myanmar firm Blue Temple are going up in Mandalay for less than $1,300 per home, Stefan Novakovic writes. (Azure) Eight landscape architects look back on Hurricane Katrina — and Rita, and Andrew, etc. — in a discussion about the ways that superstorms transformed the profession. One observation from New Orleans’s own Dana Nunez Brown: “The national firms came in, and they were like patriarchies — they were telling us what to do. If you don’t know New Orleans and you come in and try to do that, you’re going to get skewered. I think those national firms actually set us back.” (Landscape Architecture Magazine) New Zealand’s new national Te Rua Archives, designed by Auckland’s Warren and Mahoney Architects, incorporates Māori elements in a structure meant to protect the nation’s historical records from a 1-in-1,800-year earthquake, Matthew Marani writes. (Architectural Record) Alex Bozikovic praises a pivot by the Vancouver Art Gallery from a dramatic expansion by Herzog and de Meuron to a scheme designed by Formline and KPMB that he describes as “smaller, shorter and more Canadian.” (Globe and Mail) | 
