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Snøhetta's design for a new French asylum court seeks to offer ‘a place of calm during a time of intense turmoil’

2023-02-17T11:52:00-05:00

Snøhetta has been chosen to design a new National Court of Asylum and Administrative Court in Montreuil, France. The proposed scheme sees the two courts arranged on one site around large green areas, offering what the team calls “a place of calm during what can be a time of intense turmoil.”

Image credit: Aesthetica.Studio for Snøhetta

The court will function as a place where judges hear the cases of individuals who appeal against decisions made by the wing of the French government overseeing refugees and asylum seekers. Hearing thousands of annual cases of people from over 160 countries, the court is considered the final jurisdiction for deciding the future of asylum seekers in France, overseeing residence permit disputes, refusals, and orders to leave the country.

Image credit: Aesthetica.Studio for Snøhetta

Recognizing the positive impact of natural environments on mental and physical health, the scheme seeks to use the natural landscape as an extension of the court, including a 75...

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...

Dutch prisons converted into homes for refugees

2017-06-21T18:09:00-04:00

As the country’s crime rate and prison population have steadily declined for years, dozens of correctional facilities have closed altogether. So when the number of migrants started to rise—more than 50,000 entered the Netherlands last year alone—the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) saw a solution.

Many prisons in the Netherlands have been repurposed to house refugees who are waiting to be granted asylum status, a process that usually takes at least six months. Free to come and go as they please, the refugees are not allowed to work but are encouraged to learn Dutch and build connections with the surrounding community.

Looking back at a time when architecture was thought to be a cure for mental illness

2017-03-24T12:34:00-04:00

When the Government Hospital for the Insane opened in Anacostia in 1855, the asylum’s supervising physician, Charles Nichols, predicted that 50 percent of the mentally ill people treated there would make a full recovery. What made him so confident? The building. He’d designed it in accordance with the most cutting-edge theories of the day, which called for sunny, well-ventilated asylums in the countryside

The "Architecture of an Asylum: St. Elizabeth's 1852-2017" is a new exhibit opening at the National Building Museum this weekend. It looks at past theories that contended that design could have a major and healing effect on mental illness. Fresh air was encouraged, as was scattering patients across a campus.

While presumably nicer than precedents: “It turns out that’s not true. You can’t fix brain chemistry with architecture.”

Ruimteveldwerk maps 'modes of movement' for asylum seekers in Oslo

2016-09-13T18:30:00-04:00

According to estimates by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, up to 60,000 people will seek asylum in Norway this year alone, most of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these newly-arrived people have little knowledge of where to go to find basic resources, not to mention where to make friends. How do you spread information among a constantly changing group of people who don’t have either the visibility or the vocality of the rest of a city’s population?

For Modes of Movement, one of the 2016 Oslo Triennale commissioned ‘intervention strategies’, the Belgian collective Ruimteveldwerk met with asylum seekers in Oslo to gather information and anecdotes about places they found useful or appealing. They then converted their findings into a city guide, which delineates fundamental resources like medical centers and shelters, alongside places where asylum seekers can simply meet one another and share stories and experiences.

Like the rest of the intervention strategies in ...