In architecture school, I was introduced to the concept of the “panopticon” not as a critique of the state but as an interesting premise for ordering space.Įarlier this year, I asked people on Twitter for examples of buildings that reminded them of prisons, half-expecting most answers to be works of contemporary architecture. Despite their gloomy bleakness and claustrophobia-inducing tightness, they often serve as inspiration for designers. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s sixteen engraved prints of imaginary prisons, called the “carceri d’invenzione,” are presented frequently in architecture schools as examples of the sort of spatial layering and depth architects should aim to produce with their building designs. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Gothic Arch from Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), ca. Anything can serve as what is, in architecture parlance, called “formal precedent,” which is a jargony way of saying “inspiration.” Shapes, paintings, colors, other buildings, concepts - all are taken as fair and equal fodder for design, and often out of context. Contemporary architectural education is a generally apolitical and asocial experience wherein, aesthetically, almost anything goes. Coffee table books and Instagram accounts have been made in appreciation of this style, but most of the reactions I continue to hear are that these buildings look like prisons. In recent years, Brutalism, an architectural style born in the mid-twentieth century that made heavy use of exposed concrete and monolithic shapes, has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance. It’s a humorous irony that architects are attracted to a prison that superficially “does not look” like one, when so many works of contemporary architecture are regularly compared to prisons. From the outside, it looks the same, but inside, it’s significantly less humane than its original design intended.
#Imaginary prisons prints windows#
The windows still stretch from floor to ceiling, but the clear glass has been replaced with frosted panes, meaning that both sunlight and views of the outside world are considerably obstructed. Steel double bunks have replaced the built-in hardwood beds that once made the cells more hospitable than those of the average prison, and matching wood desks have also been removed.
The apertures are also beveled, meaning that they cast less shade toward the inside of the building and allow more light to stream in.īuilt in 1975 and designed to accommodate a maximum of four hundred inmates, MCC Chicago currently houses 641. Seven feet in height but less than six inches in width, they are not wide enough to require bars, making the cells (in theory) feel less prisonlike from the inside. These windows are tall, thin openings that read as elegant slits in the building’s facade. The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. It also reduces the required length of internal corridors and maximizes the ratio of vertical to horizontal surface area, admitting more natural light through the windows. The triangular configuration is a straightforward move that accomplishes a lot - it sets the building back from Van Buren Street, shielding it from street noise and from the elevated trains that run along that major thoroughfare. MCC Chicago’s distinguishing features, in addition to its rooftop exercise yard, are its triangular footprint and the shape of its windows. But the Harry Weese–designed edifice is undeniably more thoughtfully devised and strikingly detailed than most publicly funded buildings today.
There is a federal prison in downtown Chicago, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, that is celebrated by architects because it “doesn’t look like a prison.” That fact hardly matters to the people inside, of course - the building is still a prison.
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