In the episode "The Seven-Beer Snitch" of The Simpsons, Frank Gehry designs a concert hall that is later turned into a prison.

Last week the Architect’s Newspaper reported that Frank Gehry, the 88-year old superstar of American architecture, is teaching a course at SCI-Arc this spring entitled “The Future of Prison.”

To denizens of architecture Twitter, which has specialized in outrage over the past several months, the news seemed like a bad April Fool’s joke. Even the course description had the tone-deaf optimism of a Silicon Valley pitch line, asking “emerging architects to break free of current conventions and re-imagine what we now refer to as ‘prison’ for a new era.” 

It turns out the actual course may not be worthy of much controversy, since it probably has more to do with preventing incarceration than redesigning it. According to SCI-Arc, Gehry Partners will be collaborating with two non-profit organizations that help divert youth from the prison system, house formerly incarcerated people, and create policy for criminal justice reform.

Still, it says something about architecture in 2017 that its most famous practitioner, a famously aloof public figure, is wading into the fraught details of such a pressing moral and political issue.

People who have followed Frank Gehry’s long career should be shocked to see him take on prison reform, since the starchitect has often been cantankerous on the question of his own social responsibility. He once gave reporters the finger for merely repeating the suggestion that his buildings are more surface than substance. By way of justification, he called the majority of the world’s architecture “pure shit” and told journalists not to hassle the few architects trying to “do something special.”

It’s this puristic self-conception that makes his willingness to engage a site like a prison so unprecedented. Gehry has always thought of himself primarily as an artist, preferring to see architecture’s practical dimensions as technical problems. As his formal experiments grew more ambitious and aesthetic innovation came to dominate his sense of purpose, social concerns receded even further.

To defend his practice Gehry takes the Frank Lloyd Wright approach: refusing to apologize for his own genius and insisting his vision alone is a great enough gift to society. But unlike Wright, Gehry has never formulated any broadly egalitarian visions for improving the lives of his fellow humans. 

In fact, the starchitect has tended to view people as merely incidental to his grand compositions (often concocted for unsavory clients without a shred of social consciousness). His unrealized designs for Barclays Center and the Atlantic Yards megaproject in Brooklyn provoked widespread protest from the surrounding community before they were tabled. He also designed the embattled scheme for a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which has been the subject of a seven-year public relations battle between artists and museum administrators over labor conditions in the Gulf.

Gehry’s recent interest in the prison is also ironic in light of his own early buildings in Los Angeles, which established his reputation as a postmodern stylist by cleverly repurposing chicken-wire, security fencing, and concrete blocks into unlikely sculptural forms.

The leftist academic Mike Davis famously savaged Gehry’s work in his history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, describing his design for the Francis Goldwyn Regional Branch Library as a fortified bunker in keeping with the racialized paranoia of L.A.’s urban spaces that defined the post-Watts Riots era.

His harsh ‘deconstructivist’ vocabulary may have been a satisfying intellectual exercise in the waning years of postmodern academic discourse, but it also oriented architecture away from the messy material politics of public sphere and the real people who inhabit it. 

Fast forward three decades back to the present. Can an aging, phenomenally successful architect change his orientation to social justice? Another current project may demonstrate how much Gehry can achieve in the public interest and how much he still has to learn.

In 2015, Gehry was selected to take control of the master plan for the revitalization of the Los Angeles River, a project with roots in decades of citizen activism and a sprawling oversight team that ranges from small community non-profits to the Army Corps of Engineers. 

Gehry Partners was brought on under shady circumstances—he was secretly selected by Mayor Eric Garcetti and the LA River Revitalization Corp., a nonprofit with ties to deep-pocketed philanthropists—but the architect has committed to doing his homework and processing the complexity of previous landscape plans produced with grassroots input.
it’s still too early to write off the architect’s interest in making positive change 

For now the firm has produced only a low-profile website with a summary of its research that nods briefly to environmental and economic justice. True to form, Gehry has coarsely admonished the critics who have challenged his role in the project. But he has also taken a wonkish interest in environmental and social issues. He has spoken publicly about the need to retain stormwater, provide accessible recreation spaces, and mitigate health risks in riverfront communities.

The outcome of the river plan will be the test of Gehry’s newfound interest in the texture of civic life and of his ability to collaborate with community organizations. Those groups can and should challenge his creative direction if it buries their needs underneath a grand design scheme — especially since power players in the city’s real estate community favor investment friendly icons over neighborhood amenities. But it’s still too early to write off the architect’s interest in making positive change.

Its unfortunate name notwithstanding, the “The Future of Prisons” should be afforded the same chance. After all, the course’s title is less important than the way it structures how students relate to politics and conceive of their role in progressive causes. Are SCI-Arc students learning to address the spatialized injustices that pave the way to incarceration, or is this another instance of self-congratulatory design solutionism?

The studio will be successful if it teaches students to understand the architectural dimension of mass incarceration as one piece of a complex political issue rather than a design brief in and of itself. Hopefully it encourages them to take the route that Studio Gang, Michael Maltzan Architecture, and others have paved in working with coalitions of policy makers and organizers to help where they can, by tackling select manifestations of urban inequality they are actually equipped to address.the class should teach a new generation of architects to cultivate personal engagements with politics that transcend design

Above all, the class should teach a new generation of architects—who will graduate into Donald Trump’s America—to cultivate personal engagements with politics that transcend design. As the Architecture Lobby organizer Keefer Dunn put it the week after the election, “The architectural imaginary should no longer be considered progressive on its own terms. If we believe that architects have something to contribute to the vision of a progressive society, then we must insert ourselves into the real space of politics and let that recursively reflect on our theory.”

This will sound intuitive to the thousands of architecture students who have been marching and organizing for change since November. With any luck, Frank Gehry will learn a few things from them.