Archinect - Features

Architect Deanna Van Buren on Designing Beautiful Spaces That "Amplify Self-Care, Love, Restoration, and Respect"

2019-10-08T07:00:00-04:00

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) is an Oakland, California-based architecture and real estate development non-profit that is working to end mass incarceration by "building infrastructure that attacks its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself," according to the firm's website.

DJDS is led by Deanna Van Buren, an architect who "designs spaces for peacemaking, inside and out" that is working to envision a world without prisons, and Kyle Rawlins, a real estate developer. The firm's necessary work involves upending America's blatantly unequal and inherently violent criminal justice system by proposing spaces that strive to instead achieve justice, healing, and reconciliation through alternative, human-centered means. The firm's work takes place both within correctional facilities through educational and self-care initiatives that help incarcerated people retain their humanity, as well as outside prisons, by helping re...

Screen/Print #60: Suzannah Victoria Beatrice Henty on the contradictory nature of reparation politics

2017-07-28T12:00:00-04:00

What does it mean when a country takes responsibility for a historical act of injustice while ignoring its contemporary actions of a similar nature? In this essay by Suzannah Victoria Beatrice Henty for The Funambulist, she examines the often-contradictory nature of reparation politics.

Frank Gehry, Architectural Education, and the “Future of Prisons”

2017-04-12T11:20:00-04:00

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.”

Designing support for incarcerated trans and GNC people: an interview with Support.fm from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-30T12:09:00-04:00

“Support.fm is necessary because we have an unjust bail system that keeps people in prison and detention for up to years at a time before ever seeing trial,” says Blaine O’Neill, one-third of Support.fm, a crowdfunding tool to support, in particular, trans and gender nonconforming (GNC) people in jail, prison and detention. Comprising O’Neill, Rye Skelton and Grace Dunham, Support.fm is a platform that uses design and new technologies to securely and anonymously connect a network of supporters to grassroots, trans and GNC led organizations that run community bail funds. We talked with them as part of Archinect’s live podcasting event Next Up: Floating Worlds.

A review of Joe Day's "Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime" (2013, Routledge)

2013-09-10T11:25:00-04:00

“Since 2000, institutions of display and discipline have taken on transnational dimensions, many of them unanticipated and controversial. In the most literal of convergences, yesteryear’s prisons have simply been reopened as today’s museums.”