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?
— The New York Times
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."
2 Comments
That column is a whole lot of generic political nothing. So he suddenly believes in design excellence after neglecting design for years unless it fits into his narrow bureaucratic agenda. Kimmelman always gets lost in his own political fluff, but doesn’t seem to actually know anything
it would cost a lot less to just rebuild Rikers island itself with better transportation access and better design. However the bureocritics want design excellence as long as it follows their preprogrammed constraints and high gov budget — neighborhood jails that will probably be more claustrophobic and crappy than a spacious reformed Rikers could be.
“Attempting to place architects at the center of the debate“ ..... no he is just placing himself at the center. Deep architecture expertise is never going to really happen at the current politics first NYT. Show don’t tell me
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