Researching Prison Architecture & The Architect Role
Studying the impact that designers can have on prisons
One issue being debated in relation to prison architecture is dehumanizing conditions. In the article, “Just Design: Healthy Prisons and the Architecture of Hope”, Yvonne Jewkes explores the possibility that there is disconnect between designers and inhabitants as a contributing factor.
“…architects might be accused of neglecting both personality and body of the eventual occupant of their designed spaces…they orientate towards interactions and flows of people as they inhabit spaces, rather than at individual lived experience. This appears to be a particular problem in the design of incarceration”².
This critique calls design process into question. Designers may think about designing space on a technical or functional level, but perhaps neglect how that space will be received and lived in by the end user. This in turn has an impact on prisoners serving a sentence, and how they re-emerge into society.
For further discussion on this issue, we will take a look at the lived experience of one inmate from the world famous Halden Prison.
Chapter 2 of the book “Prison Architecture and Humans”, is a reflection by John K (who served a lengthy sentence in Halden). Since much architecturally driven research that I’ve come across will cite Halden as “The World’s Most Humane Prison”, I was a bit taken back by the perspective presented.
“This is off the beaten track and far from civilization. The world’s “most humane prison” was built here, away from the town, so as not to annoy the few people who…have settled in this small town”
“I was seeking human contact, I cried and I had difficulty getting through each day. I asked for help, I asked for a psychologist, but not help was available. The prison did not have the capacity to give me an appointment with a psychologist…”
“…The fact that so-called experts have decided that Norwegian nature…will be good for me makes me mor angry than you can imagine.”¹.
While the location of the facility was intended to bring peace of mind to citizens and inmates alike, the isolation from wider society and social interaction created an unsettling quiet (something that perhaps the world has gotten to know better over the course of the recent pandemic). Research driven decisions such as the colors of the room, furniture, and materiality amount to very little from his perspective without human connection. While architects have decided what works technically, there may be a missing human element to design. This insight aligns with the some of the work found by Yvonne Jewkes.
“… empathetic engagement is unlikely in prison design because most architectural professionals cannot or do not envisage themselves or their close relatives ending up in custody…”².
Her study finds that architects designing other facilities or institutions such as residential homes for the elderly were much more responsive and successful. Architects were able to be “self-referential, drawing on their own experiences, or those of their relatives”², when designing space for bodily experiences. A troubling consequence is that architects will fall back on pre-existing models for prison architecture rather than designing something new and more responsive.
“Old ideas are regurgitated and lack of end user engagement in the design process ensure that lessons are never learned…The consequences of all these inhibitors to empathetic design are that prison spaces are generative of only negative meanings…”².
This is part of ongoing research for me. Any feedback or insight would be greatly appreciated ^^
[1] Johnsen, Berit & Fransson, Elisabeth & Giofrè, Francesca. “Prison, Architecture and Humans.” 2018.
[2] Jewkes, Yvonne. “Just Design: Healthy Prisons and the Architecture of Hope.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, vol. 51, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 319–338.
