Changing Skyline: Where politics meets poor design

I owe the architects at EwingCole an apology for trashing their Family Court building, planned for an empty lot across from JFK Plaza, at 15th and Arch Streets.

It's not the designers' fault that the bulky, 14-story building, a clone of the original, mediocre Penn Center slab towers, will be a mean and frosty rendition of America's most noble architectural form, the courthouse.

Thanks to Friday's Inquirer article on the Pennsylvania courts' casual oversight of the $200 million project, we now know that the real architect of this affront to democracy is Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, who presided over the project while it was milked for fees by a pair of political insiders, lawyer Jeffrey B. Rotwitt and developer Donald W. Pulver.

If the lax management of this important project teaches us anything, it's this: Bad civic design doesn't grow out of barren soil. It takes an entrenched and cynical political culture to provide the fertilizer. Who knows how much more money would have been available for quality architecture if Castille had done a better job policing how the pennies were spent?

Whether he understood what his real estate adviser was up to remains unclear. The Supreme Court justice told Inquirer reporters Joseph Tanfani and Mark Fazlollah that the crafty Philadelphia lawyer had duped him.

But Castille is the project's point person, and he signed off on a 2008 contract that paid Rotwitt handsomely out of a special fund meant to cover the early costs of the desperately needed courthouse - a fund, incidentally, that was accumulated by adding a 20 percent surcharge on every court filing in Philadelphia. Your divorce petition helped underwrite Rotwitt's $55,000-a-month retainer.

Castille, a former Philadelphia district attorney, agreed to that generous consultant's fee even though there was no formal contract to build the courthouse. Rotwitt, who would ultimately receive $3.9 million for his advice under the arrangement, then significantly boosted his take-home from the project by persuading Pulver to give him a 50 percent share in the future development deal.