Archinect - News

Demolition work for Lower Manhattan's superjail is making Chinatown residents 'terrified'

2024-04-09T15:16:00-04:00

The demolition of ‘The Tombs’ Manhattan Detention Complex to prepare for the 300-foot ‘Jailscraper’ (aka the ‘Chinatown Jail’) in Lower Manhattan is meting out further headaches for residents around the Columbus Park area, the majority of whom are elderly, ABC7 reported recently.

Cracks and other noticeable damage are now beginning to appear in adjacent structures as the 900-bed behemoth is being taken down in advance of the construction of a controversial new facility that is promoted as being more ‘humane’ than its predecessor and the city’s Rikers Island facility — despite activists’ criticisms.

"We absolutely do not trust Gramercy Group with anything anymore," a member of the group Neighbors United Below Canal told journalists. "They violated the trust of this community. They violated the trust of the building next door. They've cracked their building. There's water seeping into this building as we speak."

In response, Councilmember Christopher Marte has asked the city's Buildin...

The Italian state is converting a notorious 18th-century prison into a new cultural center in Tuscany

2022-02-02T13:04:00-05:00

The Italian state is spending €70 million ($86 million) to rehabilitate structural remains at Santo Stefano and neighboring coastal sites. At the former, the government is building an open-air museum that will illustrate the site’s dark past, along with gardens and conference rooms that will be used for seminars and events focused on cultural and political themes.

The cultural center will be located inside the site of a former 18th-century prison originally constructed under the reign of King Ferdinand IV in a now aging village called Santo Stefano. The project is being overseen by the state’s cultural minister Dario Franceschini and mirrors efforts in America and Georgia to convert sites with less-than-humanistic original purposes into centers of art and culture that make education about the uses (and abuses) of the sites a part of their public program. The Romanesque panopticon was built to allow for constant monitoring of its inmates known for housing anti-fascists who were exiled there during the Mussolini era.

Another government official told The Art Newspaper that part of the new cultural center will include a "School of High Thoughts, that welcomes all the best training experiences on human rights, the dignity of the person, and justice.” The project is being named after progressive former European Parliament president David Sassoli, ...

The debate around prison reuse swells as reform measures continue to decrease incarceration rates dramatically

2021-11-11T12:51:00-05:00

Some prisons have been successfully transformed into whiskey distilleries, youth hostels, museums and boutique hotels. Others have been demolished, sometimes over the objections of local preservationists. But there’s a third option: Carceral sites can be reoriented as places that actively work to undo the damage wrought by mass incarceration.

The movement to design spaces that are actively working to undo some of the social harms caused by mass incarceration is still fairly nascent, with salient projects in Atlanta and other places serving as models that can be applied in the age of bail reform, alternative sentencing, and other measures that have reduced the overall prison population by up to 42% in certain states.

“Our view is that more architects should instead help those who are formerly incarcerated so they don’t go back to prison, and to support populations who are targeted and at high-risk for incarceration,” DJDS founder Deanna van Buren told Archinect’s Antonio Pacheco in a 2019 interview. The impetus should be shifted even further towards designing spaces that alleviate the sources of crime in the mold of DJDS. As Thoreau said: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

Construction of New York City's first borough-based jail underway in Queens

2021-07-16T17:17:00-04:00

Construction on NYC's first borough-based jail is officially underway, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced. Work on the Kew Gardens, Queens facility marks the first major move to build four smaller and "more humane" jails in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. The $8.3 billion effort comes via the Borough-Based Jails Program, a controversial plan passed by the City Council in October 2019, aimed at closing the 10 jails now in operation on Rikers Island.

The new, approximately 105-foot-tall structure will include a 25,000-square-foot, two-level, multi-purpose community space, along with a 600-car public parking garage. The 866-bed facility will replace the current Queens Detention Complex, which is located adjacent to Queens Borough Hall and the Queens Criminal Courthouse.

The parking garage and community space will feature a partially planted green roof, solar panels, and on-site stormwater retention. This portion of the project is expected to qualify for LEED Gold certification for environmental sustainability.

The NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC) is managing the overall Borough-Based Jails program citywide. The Queens jail is being created by a design-build team consisting of Hunter Roberts Construction Group and architecture firms Marvel and Urbahn Architects. Work on the project is expected to complete in early 2023.

Procurement and early site preparation activities are ongoing for the other three Borough-Based...

Weiss/Manfredi to repurpose jail facility in Dallas for alternative uses

2020-08-20T15:37:00-04:00

New York City-based Weiss/Manfredi and Dallas-based Malone Maxwell Dennehy Architects (MMDA) have been selected by the Trinity Park Conservancy to redesign an existing jail facility in Dallas for alternative uses.

The project comes to the two firms, MMDA will serve as Architect of Record while Weiss/Manfredi works as the design architect, after a lengthy selection process that involved 45 other competitors and a shortlist made up of seven other firms. An announcement highlighting the team's selection explains that the project team will work with the Trinity Park Conservancy to "integrate the building and its surrounding neighborhoods" into Harold Simmons Park, a forthcoming 200-acre park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates that will eventually connect downtown Dallas to surrounding areas.

“We are inspired by the potential of 106 W Commerce to create a dynamic community destination and gateway to Harold Simmons Park, and are thrilled to begin work with the Trinity Park Con...

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces unveils plan to re-purpose Atlanta city jail into "Center for Equity"

2020-06-19T20:32:00-04:00

Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) has unveiled a set of schematic proposals aimed at re-imagining Atlanta’s city jail as a Center for Equity.

The plans follow extensive community consultation and design development workshops focused on finding a new use for a 471,000-square-foot jail facility that has been rendered obsolete due to a wave of criminal and law enforcement reforms enacted by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

A proposed "Super Lobby" space will bring a new community space to the neighborhood.

In an update announcing the latest phase of the project posted to the group's Medium, the DJDS explains that "it is important to recognize that despite the end of slavery 'in theory,' the oppression of black communities continued and transformed into new laws and policies forming a new system of enslavement through mass incarceration."

Citing author Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Inc...

Michael Kimmelman lobbies AIA to bar architects from working on solitary confinement facilities

2020-06-15T13:01:00-04:00

But death chambers and many solitary confinement cells — they’re officially called segregation units, not incidentally — are extreme cases. Architects should not contribute their expertise to the most egregious aspects of a system that commits exceptional violence against African-Americans and other minorities. The least the American Institute of Architects can do now is agree.

The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has penned a column highlighting the moral implications of having architects design solitary confinement and execution facilities. In the article, Kimmelman explores the American Institute of Architect's reluctance to take a positive stand against having architects design these facilities.

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces on "unbuilding racism"

2020-06-05T14:47:00-04:00

Community development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) has published a vision designed around the idea of "unbuilding racism" in light of the growing movement to abolish police and prisons that has garnered national attention in the wake of the anti-racism and policy brutality protests that are currently griping the United States.

Writing in a Medium post, the group, which is led by Deanna Van Buren, explains that they are "grieving for the intolerable and constant deaths of black and brown people at the hands of the police, and all the other lives lost through the impacts of mass incarceration," adding, "This is why we are prison abolitionists."

Previously on Archinect: "Architect Deanna Van Buren on Designing Beautiful Spaces That 'Amplify Self-Care, Love, Restoration, and Respect'." The Designing Justice + Designing Spaces team with co-founders Kyle Rawlins and Deanna Van Buren third and fourth from the left. Photo by Oretola Thomas.

Speaking to competing de...

Freezing prisons: intentional design or unfortunate oversight?

2019-12-27T18:21:00-05:00

In a recent Vox report, writer Roxanna Asagarian delves into the troubling phenomenon of incarcerated individuals struggling to stay warm in their cells as temperatures drop throughout the winter season. Reaction from the public over the issue seems to be split with regards to how this inmate comfort should be handled.

Considering that prisons are often designed with the intention to deprive personal comfort in any sense, the issue of individuals being deprived of warmth isn’t unexpected.

Asagarian reports, "Because the US system of prisons and jails is so vast — including 50 state prison systems, the federal prison system, and nearly 3,000 jurisdictions that include cities, counties, and Indian reservations — and because there are no federally mandated laws on temperature control, American prisoners are exposed to a wide range of conditions. Even at the state and local levels, there are few laws around this, leaving incarcerated people at the mercy of the courts to implement prot...

Michael Kimmelman on the future of jails in NYC

2019-12-19T19:29:00-05:00

Will New York’s new jails be places where visiting families feel welcome? Will the jails provide space for police officers and medical staff to train together? For detainees to confer with lawyers? For therapeutic assistance and recreation? Outside as well as inside, will they be scaled to their surroundings, will the city be open to other sites and will the buildings architecturally represent, as borough landmarks, our civic ideals and values?

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, provides an spirited overview of the ongoing developments in New York City regarding the planned decommissioning and relocation of the prison facilities located on Rikers Island. The large-scale infrastructure and architecture practice AECOM was recently selected to design four high-rise replacement facilities that are to be located one per borough (except on Staten Island).

Attempting to place architects at the center of the debate, Kimmelman writes, "If we’re going to keep building jails, can new architecture help heal what ails the penal system? Jails are works of architecture, after all."

Interrogating the impacts of NYC’s Rikers jail replacement plan

2019-12-12T14:06:00-05:00

The height of the new jail towers was later slashed from 45 storeys to a maximum of 29, but the damage had been done. The images of these brutish concrete silos symbolised a rack’em and stack’em approach, attracting criticism from both prison reform advocates and the communities in which these fortified slabs were to be planted.

Writing in The Guardian, critic Oliver Wainwright examines competing visions for the future of New York City’s prisons.

Earlier this year, AECOM was selected to envision a dispersed carceral archipelago for the city that would take the place of the sordid Rikers Island prison. The plan has faced strong opposition from groups like No New Jails NYC and others who seek to have the city move away from mass incarceration and toward alternative forms of justice administration.

Private prisons, including ICE detention centers, are now illegal in California

2019-09-17T12:33:00-04:00

The recently passed AB-32 bill in California prevents the state from "entering into or renewing a contract with a private, for-profit prison to incarcerate state prison inmates, but would not prohibit the department from renewing or extending a contract to house state prison inmates in order to comply with any court-ordered population cap," according to the legislative text.

Under the bill, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations will phase-out the department's existing contracts by 2028.The bill, once signed by California Governor Gavin Newson, is set to go into effect on January 1, 2020.

The Guardian reports that move would close all four of the state's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, which are run by private prison company GEO Group. The news comes as debate within the architectural profession intensifies regarding the moral and ethical implications of designing such facilities. The private prison business is booming under Pres...

Los Angeles County cancels contract for $1.7 billion jail

2019-08-15T07:00:00-04:00

In a 4-1 vote, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed today to cancel a $1.7 billion design and build contract with McCarthy Builders that it had approved in February. “The contract with McCarthy Builders for a custody facility does not fit this board’s vision of a care-first model,” said Supervisor Hilda Solis.

American Institute of Architects denounces "misuse" of detention center buildings

2019-07-22T16:41:00-04:00

The American Institute of Architect (AIA) has issued a statement denouncing the inhumane conditions that have been discovered over recent weeks across the country at the detention centers where undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers are being detained.

The conditions as described by numerous media reports and congressional fact-finding missions to detention facilities make clear that these buildings are not designed to handle the sheer numbers of people in them nor do they sustain the health, safety, and welfare of their occupants, many of whom are women and children. Above all, the misuse of these buildings and the impact on occupants in them are contrary to our values as architects and as Americans.

Pointing to the organization's Code of Ethics, AIA urges that "the built environment promotes and preserves the health, safety, and welfare of every individual, and fosters universal respect for human dignity."

In addition, AIA argues that architects are well-prepared to "promote t...

Under Trump, the private prison business is booming

2019-07-15T15:55:00-04:00

In the 2018 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 396,448 people were booked into an ICE detention facility, up 22.5% from a year earlier, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Between October and January, apprehensions along the southwest border rose to 201,497, up a third from the same period a year ago.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the private prison business is booming as a result of the hardline immigration policies of President Donald Trump.

Despite the growing controversies surrounding the government's treatment of detained migrants in increasingly makeshift and inadequate facilities, the industry's growth is expected to continue.

According to WSJ, in a recent research note surveying the business dealings of private prison companies CoreCivic and GEO Group, investment bank SunTust Robinson Humphrey writes, "We expect criminal alien populations housed by the private sector to increase due to heightened enforcement and increased border apprehensions.”

WSJ also writes that over the last year, with new facilities going up from California to Mississippi, private prison companies have fared better financially than many other industries, even amid an overall market rally.

Former Internment Camp becomes Immigrant Shelter

2019-06-12T14:11:00-04:00

The Trump Administration has opted to use an Army base in Oklahoma to hold growing numbers of immigrant children in its custody after running out of room at government shelters. Fort Sill, an 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As of April 30, 2019, the department of Health and Human Services has taken 40,900 children seeking asylum into custody along the southern border, a 57% increase from 2018, according to Time.

The surge in detainees has overwhelmed existing and new temporary detention facilities in southern border states, so the department has had to make use of a variety of improvised facilities as it undertakes the lengthy, disorganized, and laborious process of reuniting these children with their family members.

That includes holding children in a repurposed former Walmart superstore in Brownsville, Texas, detaining asylum-seeking families in a makeshift, dirt-floored outdoor camp located underneath a highway overpass in El Paso, Texas, holding 1,500 migrants in a private prison in Louisiana known for documented cases of inmate abuse and medical neglect, and now, shuttling temporary detainees to Fort Sill, a military base in Oklahoma that was used during World War II as an internment camp for Ja...

AECOM to build Rikers Island replacement facilities across New York's boroughs

2019-05-31T09:12:00-04:00

A joint venture led by global architecture and infrastructure firm AECOM has been awarded a $107.4 million contract by the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) for the development of four new correctional facilities set to replace the existing Rikers Island jail complex.

AECOM will lead the project as part of a joint venture with Philadelphia-based construction management firm Hill International.

The new correctional facilities will be located on sites scattered across the city, with Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx each set to receive a new jail.

In a press release announcing their selection, AECOM writes, "new, state-of-the-art, borough-based facilities will enable New York City to make considerable improvements for people in detention, their visiting families and NYC Department of Correction employees. Each new facility will integrate health, educational and re-entry programs, as well as community space."

The team selection follows the 2017 decisio...

How a Venezuelan shopping center became a prison

2019-01-29T14:00:00-05:00

A new interactive documentary from the BBC explores the Venezuelan shopping center that became one of the country's most notorious torture centers for political prisoners. Through interviews from ex-detainees, relatives, lawyers and human rights activists, the BBC aims to bring its mysterious history to light.

Designed by Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst, and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez—and topped with one of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes—El Helicoide was intended as the world's first drive-through mall. Conceived at the height of Venezuela's economic growth, the ambitious project promoted a narrative of progress centered around consumerism, car culture, and social mobility.

However, the economic and political upheaval in 1950s Venezuela caused the project to fall apart, halting construction and leaving it empty for many years. Eventually, it was taken over by the government, who used it as a temporary flood shelter before adapting it as the headquarters for Venezuela's intelligenc...

A look at school design leading students towards prison

2018-07-25T16:13:00-04:00

In the past — or in schools with higher proportions of white students — a student acting out might garner an intervention by their principal, or a concerned teacher’s phone call to parents. But today, throughout the US, discipline in many schools has become a matter of law enforcement, rather than education. In New York, the majority of school guards — 5,000 School Safety Agents patrolling 2,300 public and private schools — are civilians employed by the School Safety Division of the NYPD.

Out of fearful reaction to school shootings and other safety concerns, many school environments look and feel like prison to the students attending. Through an extensive background on how school design has gotten to this point, "Where School Meets Prison" examines the impact prison-like design has on students and argues damaging results of higher student arrest rates and discrimination.

With a strong police presence and physical security infrastructure, student Andrea Colon shares how school design can become a pipeline to prison.

The Architecture Lobby and ADPSR take a stand against Justice Department's zero-tolerance policy, pressuring the AIA to do the same

2018-06-20T20:33:00-04:00

The Architecture Lobby and Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility have issued a joint statement condemning the Justice Department's widely criticized zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy that has led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents as families seek asylum at the border.

"It is immoral and inhumane to separate children from their parents, and to use family separation to deter people seeking refuge or asylum. The United States must uphold international and U.S. laws protecting people fleeing violence and persecution," the statement reads.

The two organizations, which work to advance architecture by advocating for social justice reform within the field, are calling on architects, designers, planners and allied professionals to boycott any design work relating to these policies. This includes, as the statement says, walls, checkpoints, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, detention facilities, processing centers, and ...

Learning from Rikers Island: the future of carceral infrastructure in New York City

2017-12-08T13:36:00-05:00

Mayor de Blasio’s recent pledge to close the Rikers Island jail complex within ten years was met with celebration by many — and skepticism by others. After 85 years in the public imagination, it has become hard to believe that the East River behemoth could ever really be slain. But the reality of a post-Rikers future is coming into focus [...]. Rikers is toxic, and its era is done. A change is on the wind, it seems, and the island’s aura of inevitability is finally dispersing.

In their Urban Omnibus essay, "A Jail to End All Jails," authors Jarrod Shanahan and Jack Norton take a closer look at the history and a potential future of one of the nation's most notorious prisons and the greater jail infrastructure of a city where the average daily incarcerated population was at 9,400 in 2017.

"Following the recommendation of the Lippman Commission in calling for a system of local jails to replace the central complex, de Blasio has released a plan for Rikers’ closure and sought support from consultants and City Council members in siting new jails or expanding existing borough facilities to accommodate more prisoners. The logic goes that jails in the boroughs will be closer to courts, helping cases move through the system more efficiently, and closer to the support of family and social services, helping prisoners stay out of the system once released."

Putting one of America's most notorious prisons on the map

2016-04-13T12:34:00-04:00

Rikers Island looms large in New York’s imagination. It is home to a notorious complex of prisons, one whose excesses are still being discovered by the media and the courts. Many would like to see the Rikers Island closed forever, or barring that, to at least change the name to something that does not honor a slaveowner. One group of designers has a different goal for Rikers Island—one that is within reach and, in fact, already at hand.

"The problem: On the most prominent map of New York City, Rikers Island is a nonentity. The island simply isn’t labeled on Metropolitan Transportation Authority maps inside the New York subway. The solution: Label it. On every map."

For more on the #SeeRikers campaign – or to create your own stickers with their template – visit their site.

And check out these links for related content:

Rikers Island is an environmental (and human) catastrophe

2016-03-22T18:23:00-04:00

Rikers is built on a landfill. The ground underneath the facilities is unstable and the decomposing garbage emits poisonous methane gas. In addition to extreme heat and poor air quality, flooding and crumbling infrastructure pose a serious threat, especially when superstorms like Hurricane Sandy strike. As the violence and human rights violations worsen, so do the environmental circumstances surrounding Rikers.

The article details flood-risk, extreme heat, a lack of air circulation and other air quality issues among other problems plaguing the prison.

For related content, check out some of these links:

Raphael Sperry, President of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, on the "hauntingly real" computer game, "Prison Architect"

2015-11-11T12:45:00-05:00

space and building costs are just as much of guiding principles in designing real prisons as they are in Prison Architect. [...] "Prisoners themselves are generally not included in the conversation where the prison construction budget is allocated to different priorities, so their needs come last and cell size is generally set at the legal minimum," Sperry said. "The legal standard only bars 'cruel or unusual punishment'—a cell can be punitively small as long as it doesn't cross that limit."

More on the discussion around prison architecture:

How one California prison is betting on architecture to decrease recidivism rates

2015-10-21T13:05:00-04:00

this San Diego County jail, which houses everyone from petty criminals to accused murderers and was once known for its sickening decrepitude, is at the forefront of a new and, of course, controversial movement in prison design, one that manifests a counterintuitive idea: You could build a lockup so pleasant and thoughtfully devised that inmates would never come back. [...] Welcome to Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Re-entry Facility.

Architecture of correction: Rikers Island

2015-07-08T18:00:00-04:00

As long as the City of New York has owned Rikers Island, since the 1880s, it has been a place for the unwanted. For a time, pigs were raised for slaughter there. [...] was converted to a partial landfill, full of horse manure and garbage. The odor repelled its neighbors in the boroughs, and the refuse attracted a sizable rat population, which the city tried to contain by releasing wild dogs. [...] It took poison gas to kill off the rodents. Next the city moved humans to Rikers.

From a "clean version of hell" to blabaerskog

2015-05-03T23:01:00-04:00

On any given day, there are 80,000 U.S. prisoners in solitary confinement...has led some prisoners into a profound level of what might be called ‘ontological insecurity'

About a month ago the NYT published two pieces exploring two variants of the architecture of incarceration. The first essay, examined the stark conditions of United States’ only federal supermax facility. The second, explored The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison, designed by Erik Møller Arkitekter.

Previously; The NYT on prison architecture and ethics and Pacific Standard on How Prison Architecture Can Transform Inmates' Lives

The NYT on prison architecture and ethics

2015-02-17T13:34:00-05:00

Faced with lawsuits and a growing mountain of damning research, New York City officials decided last month to ban solitary confinement for prison inmates 21 and younger. Just a few weeks earlier, the American Institute of Architects rejected a petition to censure members who design solitary-confinement cells and death chambers. [...] What are the ethical boundaries for architecture?

Previously:

How Prison Architecture Can Transform Inmates' Lives

2014-06-18T16:08:00-04:00

Though many scholars focusing on penitentiaries suspect that staff-prisoner relations are molded by institutional architecture, little empirical work has been completed on the topic. Now, a new study led by Beijersbergen and published in Crime & Delinquency has concluded that building styles, floor plans, and other design features do indeed have a significant impact on the way Dutch prisoners perceive their relationships with prison staff.