Archinect - News

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, ...

Panopticon is the new open-plan

2017-09-29T14:38:00-04:00

Good news! In response to your “concerns” about our current open-plan creative campus, we are pleased to announce our new building: a towering panopticon à la Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century vision of utilitarian corporate efficiency! In our new office, all team members will work in isolated, transparent rooms called “Cells” on the periphery of a circular tower called “Synergon.” At the center of Synergon, management will reside in “Nest,” a glowing, elevated sphere of omniscience.

Alex Baia imagines dystopian panopticon office space for app creators.

A bird's-eye view of LA with Geoff Manaugh and the LAPD

2016-03-23T13:11:00-04:00

The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists.

"Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur — not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about policing the cities of the future."

In a fascinating excerpt from his forthcoming book A Burglar's Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh relates his experience with the LAPD on their helicopter patrols of the city. "Cities get the types of crime their design calls for," he writes. And the sprawl of Los Angeles demands, and facilitates, a policial gaze from above.

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The Building Has 1,000 Eyes

2013-10-20T11:10:00-04:00

Choosing the areas to monitor within a building can be “an art,” said Paul Gottsegen, the president of the Halstead Management Company. “You want information that is important to the security of the building"...

Joanne Kaufman digs into the growth of New York residences with surveillance cameras. Whether it be the newest luxury condominium looking to attract celebrity clients, a building beginning renovations (with subsequent rise in nonresidents coming into the building) or because of changes in the neighborhood (to address "loitering" and other "criminal" behavior) Increasingly, such equipment is becoming part of building "décor".