A Paper on the Effects of Architectural Design on Inmates in the U.S.

Research Paper Outline

 

Subject

The subject of my paper will be prison architecture (correctional facilities, and detention centers) in America. I will explore the issues that exist within it and where those issues stem from.

Through research I will investigate how architecture can be used as a tool to improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation of inmates, rather than something that creates and promotes the punishment of the individual, while still allowing correctional officers to maintain some sense of order and control.

 

Section 1:

 Analysis of relationship between space and physical/mental well-being of an individual  

• General comments for the section
  • Social behavioral psychology teaches us that people’s actions, behavior, ways of thinking, etc. are heavily influenced and shaped by the environments that they are in
  • Prisons are often built like fortresses, allowing minimal sunlight–which is considered a luxury due to budget constraints

• Kalief Browder story (Rikers Island)
  • Background
    • arrested and charged of robbery after allegedly stealing someone’s backpack
    • sent to Rikers after family couldn’t pay bail, and was imprisoned without trial or conviction for three years and refused plea deal, maintaining his innocence
    • Throughout time in prison he was involved in many physical altercations with other inmates and guards, and attempted suicide on several occasions
    • For two out of three years, he was held in solitary confinement
    • June 2015, two years after trial is dismissed, Browder commits suicide by hanging himself at his home in NY
  • San Quentin State Prison

• Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Reentry Facility

• Prison in Bastoy, Norway

 

Section 2:

Why are people sent to prison, what is the intended outcome, how can a situation be created that benefits the prisoner and society?

 

• People are sent to prison because they owe a debt to society to serve time for the wrong that they have done
• There is no reason that that time spent shouldn’t include the process of rehabilitation
• The better more rehabilitated a person is during time in prison the less likely they are to go back

 

  

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island

https://www.economist.com/international/2017/05/27/too-many-prisons-make-bad-people-worse-there-is-a-better-way

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/is-there-such-a-thing-as-good-prison-design

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/arts/design/prison-architecture-and-the-question-of-ethics.html

https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/the-evolution-of-prison-design-and-the-rise-of-the-direct-supervision-model/

 

A paper on reforming the prison industrial complex through architecture:

 

Subject:

The subject of my paper will be prison architecture (correctional facilities, and detention centers) in America. I will explore the issues that exist within it and where those issues stem from.

This subject is important to explore because the “U.S. provides room and board for 25% of the world’s total prison population, according to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative; that’s 23 million people”. This subject is especially significant to me because the majority of people incarcerated in America are black males, so as a member of a group of Americans subject to this condition I feel that it makes sense for me to take advantage of my education and position as a student of architecture to try and better understand how architecture can be used to better improve the conditions of inmates.

 

Question:

My primary research questions are as follows: Has architecture been considered as a tool to improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation inmates, and if not then why?

Can architecture be used as a tool to improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation of inmates, rather than something that creates and promotes the punishment of the individual, while still allowing correctional officers to maintain some sense of order and control?

 

Method:

First, I will analyze the relationship between space and the mental well-being of a person. I will discuss basic human needs as identified by scholarly articles, books, and essays. This includes things like exposure to light, being outdoors, and generally being allowed to have some sense of comfort. During this section, at least one source I will pull information from is the Stanford Prison Experiment. I plan to show what the effects of prison-like conditions can do to every day civilians thrown into a scenario in which they are made to behave as the individuals who occupy that kind of space (prison guards and inmates).

Then, I will outline and discuss the purpose of sending a person to prison. I will research the idea behind sending someone to a penal institution, and what the outcome of that process is supposed to be. I will look at statistics regarding recidivism rates of prisons throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. “Figures from a 2016 U.S. Sentencing Commission study show America’s recidivism rates as the highest in the world, at about 60 percent.”

This will lead to a brief discussion on whether or not I believe different degrees of criminal behavior warrant different types of prison conditions, those conditions being the ones that will be outlined in the next section of the paper. In this section I will also discuss why I believe that although people are incarcerated for a reason, it does not mean that they deserve to be cramped into prisons in which they are essentially treated as less than human.

This will provide me with the opportunity to talk about the private prison industry, and why conditions are usually as bad as they are. I will discuss why it is so difficult to create change in an industry that is so tangled inside of the capitalistic interests of CEOS of the companies that have stakes within this industry.

 

Source:

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/is-there-such-a-thing-as-good-prison-design

 

Manhattan, like many other parts of the world, has experienced a drastically changing landscape over the last few centuries. When the Dutch arrived in the 1600s they began to transform a landscape that was unaltered by the activity of the Lenape Native Americans, to something that began to resemble other early settlements in the Americas. Natives were displaced and the city of Manhattan was eventually born.  During the transition from the Industrial Age to the Gilded Age Manhattan began to look like the Manhattan that is recognizable to people around the world today. It’s a highly-urbanized part of the world which must accommodate a rapidly increasing population and adapt to demographic and environmental changes.

 

In Manhattan, it is evident that within an urban context the state of architecture has shifted from that of something permanent and certain to that of something more fluid and adaptable to changing conditions in terms of the people occupying the spaces.

 

Manhattan is a landscape that is constantly changing in terms of architecture and population. While there is a significant amount of exterior architecture from the nineteenth century that still makes up the blocks of the city, skyscrapers are going up constantly and architects are designing them in a way that allows them to accommodate the shifting conditions. Rem Koolhaas goes into depth about this subject in Delirious New York. “In terms of urbanism, this indeterminacy means that a particular site can no longer be matched with any single predetermined purpose.” (Koolhaas, 85) In modern times mixed use development has become a part of many urbanized regions. Mixed use development typically includes commercial space, residential space, office space, etc. This mixed use is subject to change over time.

 

Something remarkable about skyscrapers is how in a sense they begin to serve as microcosms of the city within the city. The mixed programs within a single building can cover the range of basic human needs. “For a while our 1,200,000 square feet of rentable area seemed almost like a new continent, so vast and vacant were its many floors…More than the sum of its floors, the Equitable is promoted as a “City in itself, housing 16,000 souls.” This example may only be referring to the housing capabilities of these massive structures, but it is becoming more and more common to see buildings with some commercial program on the ground level, typically food oriented, maybe a gym, and then potentially office or apartment space in the floors above. In this highly technologically advanced society that we live in today startup companies move in and out of these types of spaces at a rapid rate.

 

 

“… the diversity of the 84 platforms of the 1909 Skyscraper holds out the promise that all this business is only a phase, a provisional occupation that anticipates the Skyscraper’s conquest by other forms of culture, floor by floor if necessary.” (Koolhaas, 87). The alternation of programs within a monolithic structure such as a skyscraper creates a paradoxical condition. From the exterior, the viewer sees the same material, form, and structure from the ground up. But if they actually go inside and move through the space they’ll see a variety of people supporting a variety of programs.

 

Koolhaas talks about skyscrapers as things that camouflage into the urban scheme of manhattan, one being hardly distinguishable from the other to the untrained or inattentive eye. This supports the idea the architecture is a contradictory thing. This contradiction between form and function continues to characterize many densely-populated cities today.

Architecture is not just about the construction of a foundation, walls, and a roof as Corbusier pointed out in Towards a New Architecture in the section “Architecture, Pure Creation of the Mind.” Architecture is an art form. It is the definition behind the process of designing buildings and landscapes; but the essence of it can be applied to other disciplines of design as well. This includes engineering, infrastructure, machines, timepieces, fashion, general systems, etc.

 

Corbusier believes that architecture manifests itself in mass and surface, and I believe that through mass and surface certain experiences are created. Mass and surface are the basis for qualities of architecture that activate our senses of sight, touch, hearing and ultimately our emotional response (if we have one at all). Through the manipulation of surfaces and masses light may enter a space a certain way at a certain time of day. Through the use of material within a surface or mass a space may feel grand or enclosed and comfortable.

 

The organization of these masses and surfaces after careful calculation has the potential to create harmonious proportions that are pleasing to the eye and that cause to stop and stare, as Corbusier as explains with the Parthenon. A similar thing happens with music, another form of art. When the right combination of notes is played, and masterfully synced with the rhythm then it causes people a feel away that can only be explained through the experience. These are the type of forms of expression that cause people to get goosebumps. “A profound projection of harmony: This is architecture” is how Corbusier describes it on page 48 of Towards a New Architecture.

 

 

I think that one of the most valuable aspects of architecture is the fact that there are so many ways and processes in which a design can be inspired. I think that any tool that has been used to arrive at a design that was effective in addressing the problem is important, but hands on modeling can open up a wide array of possibilities.

 

Through the process of experimenting with materials during the early stages of a design an architect can come across a wealth of information. Each semester the idea of material exploration seems to be enforced more and more by our studio professors.

We have been taught that model making should be thought of as part of reaching a design solution rather than just as an afterthought, or a method of representing a design that has already been completely conceived through sketches and online modeling.

When an architect is making a model, he or she is given the opportunity to push a material to its limits; whether it be plastic, wood, concrete, metal, foam, paper, etc. That creates opportunities to make accidents that can turn out to be the answers to a problem. I believe that the higher the chance that accidents occur during a design process then the higher the chance for innovative solutions.

The greatest inventions tend to be products of experimentation. There is a science to the art of design, a method that involves taking risks and not being afraid of having to move on to the next idea.

Design thinking is a complex adaptive system, so there is no autonomous method of brainstorming that governs the entire process. It is about trying different things and arriving at a number of conclusions that can help inform one another, or inspire completely new ideas.

 

 

Architecture has the ability to positively and negatively impact the world. Architecture has changed the image of Earth that is visible from space. It has transformed the image from natural landscapes and earth forms to cities filled with infrastructural systems, skyscrapers, etc. Ever since the industrial age humans have been pumping toxic chemicals into the air, wasting electricity and natural resources for our own comfort, while causing the earth to deteriorate at a rate that’s seems to grow exponentially. Architects now have a responsibility to not only acknowledge the fact of the changing climate, but to design with a conscious effort to mitigate the effects of human activity over the past century and a half. I think that sustainable architecture also provides the opportunity for the beautification of cities around the world. More green spaces, trees, etc. can help to keep cities cool and allows for a smoother transition from the natural landscape to the urban centers of the globe.

Complexity Theory is the belief that there are systems that exist in the world ranging from the size of atomic particles to the size of cities, and these systems display certain characteristics that explain the phenomena that we observe in nature on a daily basis. The four main components of complexity theory are self-organization, nonlinear systems, connectivity, and adaptation. The elements of these complex adaptive systems operate in a way that has an impact on the entire system that they exist within.

 

Emergence creates circumstances in which creativity, and systems’ intelligence are able to thrive. By “thrive” I mean that these systems are able to be sustained by the elements that they consist of. “Creativity” does not only have to apply to design, but can also be interpreted as unique behavior or characteristics within a system. The sustainability of the system is contingent upon the organizing capabilities of its components.

 

Ground up design of a system allows for local ideas and knowledge to inform the larger scheme. Adaptability is the key to a system’s ability to not only survive, but evolve into something that is more than just the sum of each of its individual components. Deborah Gordon’s ant colony studies confirm the crucial role of analytical reductionism, breaking a system down into parts which are then studied and reassembled to create a holistic understanding of the system. Ants give off pheromones, which create trails for the other ants to follow so they know where to find food. Individually these actions by the ants may seem meaningless, but after stepping back and looking at the entire system it is clear that their individual actions synergized have a positive impact. “Local information can lead to global wisdom.” Local, random interactions between components of a system regulate its direction and growth. The non-linearity of the ants’ behavior means that they constantly learn new things from one another, so since the ant colony is a complex adaptive system it is able to sustain itself.

 

The design process is meant to work like the ant colony. Design thinking is supposed to work from the ground up. It should be characterized by informality rather than rudimentary, formal actions that have been preconceived and are retrofitted to every design problem. Balmond says that the informal is opportunistic, and seizes a local moment and makes something of it. Similarly to the movement of ants within a colony, the process of generating ideas is meant to be non-linear. There’s no centralized, autonomous power regulating every move that is made. This allows for a certain level of chaos, which Balmond points out is a mix of several states of order. So, although the word chaos implies disorganization and randomness, this random assortment of elements within the system has the potential to eventually evolve into some desirable outcome.

 

This relates to the issue of globalization. In a globalized economy, local contexts are often ignored and the integrity of the cultures of smaller regions of the world is threatened by large companies. The same thing is apparent in the homogenization of urban design. Cities thousands of miles apart begin to look the same in a globalized design industry. This can seem inevitable with the rapid advancement of technology, which connects everyone and everything in the world in terms of the internet and transportation, but in a system designed to learn from the ground level macro intelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge, according to Steven Johnson.

 

The fact that chaos emerges from complex adaptive systems means that the outcome will be unknown, and this can be a bad thing in certain cases. The unpredictability of complex adaptive systems doesn’t always work in our favor, but without it systems would not be able to thrive and sustain themselves. There would be no emergence if it weren’t for the non-linearity that exists within these complex adaptive systems.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton