Logic of Sensation Essay
jacky chan ~ s3155391
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Prison:
any building, enclosure or place legally declared to be a prison for the lawful custody of persons committed by lawful authority.
Prisoner:
a person sentenced by the Court to a term of imprisonment; or ordered by the Court to be detained in a prison. This includes a person placed in the custody of the Administering Department in accordance with a lawful order for the purpose of undergoing special treatment while under restrictive custody.
This essay is a discourse on studies made during a Major Project attempt to re-instil a prison into a city’s fabric and will focus on the idea of a prison wall and what that means to be in a city. It will draw from ideas mentioned in the writings of Foucault and Deleuze about the prison as well as Sorkin’s take on the wall, culminating in a response through architectural experiments as well as written text.
The prison is an institution that precedes, in priority, over most other institutions due to the role it plays in sustaining a civilisation. The program has always had negative associations but the idea is simply no different from a hospital, a university or a museum. The peoples of any given city performs an act that is deemed unfit for the safety of the others and is put together with other people that are of similar outcome. Likewise, a hospital can be seen as a place of gathering for the sick, the university a gathering of students and a museum a gathering of art lovers. It should be made clear that the prison is a result of the violence that naturally occurs in civilisations and not a cause. It is also noteworthy that after most civil unrests and natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina), a makeshift jail is always the first institution to be restored1.
Historically, prisons used to reside in the heart of cities, with public executions and punishments occurring to serve as a warning to deter the general public from committing crimes. Such examples include the Tower of London and more locally, the old Melbourne Gaol. However as these cities grow, one possible reason as described from Foucault is the ‘major theme of illness’ which death and violence was seen as a contagion. Another reason could be the aesthetics dominating over functionality and programs such as the prison and the cemetery began to move to the edge.
1 Sarah Kaufman, ‘The Criminalisation of New Orleans in Katrina’s Wake’ 3
By putting the typology back into the city the architecture will once again play a dominant role as it did historically. This occurs primarily with the prison wall. Presently, the prison wall of a prison located in the outskirts of civilisation consists of either a barren tall concrete wall or even just a tall fence as there is very little impact on the surrounding context to take into consideration. Foucault describes heterotopias such as a prison with 6 principles, focusing on the 5th – ‘heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’2. However, I believe there’s a precursor that happens before the act of entering, a state of affect that occurs at the moment of knowing what you may enter into. This is described in the diagram where three situations take place; the first where you can see the contents behind the wall through a transparent opening as well as a sign that informs the viewer of the subject within; the second where the viewer is told of the content within but cannot see it; and lastly, the view is informed of the subject within but is given a view that has no relevance to the subject matter. In these three examples, the first would in most cases causes most affect if the person has an emotive quality tied to the subject matter through fear, longing or hatred. The third example should bear least amount of affect on the viewer due to the distractive nature of the irrelevant image over the sign. The affect in all three take place without the viewer ever having to enter into the program if said subject and wall was a prison. The act of walking on the other side of the street as a result of knowing a prison is behind the wall opposite is a result of affect whether or not you can actually see the prison. As a result, if the prison was put back into the city, the manner of approach would be one of these three. Presently, they exist in the second option where the public never sees beyond the wall.
2 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ 4
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A ‘Wall’ is defined as ‘a continuous structure that encloses or divides an area of land’. Each historic example of famous walls function as such, Hadrian’s wall, the Great wall of China, the Berlin wall and the security wall between Israel and Palestine. This structure has the means of not only dividing areas of land but also create rifts in the social construct of civilisations. “Each of these barriers has been touted as providing security for one side or the other, but each clearly marks failed politics and aggressive intransigence”3 The wall defines the ‘social physic that two bodies cannot share the same place at the same time’. This forces people to remain on their side, primarily for their well-being, which results in the main scenario of having a prison wall. In some cases the wall doesn’t require itself to be something tangible, such as nation or state lines that divide countries and states, but the effect is nonetheless the same. The diagram depicts the resemblance between a prison cell to a nation, each comprising of a wall and a gate, at different scales and different manners. The nation wall is a sovereign marked land or in Australia’s case, the natural divide of land and sea enclosing the contents within, and its gate the port of entry. Australia was originally a convict nation sent from Great Britain for petty thefts and crimes, rarely anything that amounts to murder. As a result, Australia can be historically seen quite simply as a big prison cell.
3 Michael Sorkin, ‘Introduction: Up Against the Wall’ 6
CELL BLOCK
PRISON BLOCK
CITY BLOCK
LAND BLOCK
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Relief Guard arriving at a prison hulk, deptford B. Tucker
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The following images explore the different natures a prison wall can develop into on a city block in the city of Melbourne. Some address the wall as a separation of height such as a staircase while others deal with a more traditional take on a visually solid wall. Through these experimentations, the ones that stand out visually distract the viewer from the actual program inside. Other methodologies include more experimental ones such as a change in material to signify a change of space that is widely used in architecture, although the problem with this lies in the functionality of not having a secure wall. Once again, the public is affected by the presence of the program before the eventual entering of the space. This can occur even if the person has never seen the project before, but by the thought of the program that may be put on the site in the heart of the city; the negative connotations outweigh what the architecture may or may not do. Therefore the answer leads to either one of the three choices as previously mentioned; does the architecture camouflage itself to be in the city or does it stand out as it once did.
Many of the emotions and negative criticism of putting a prison into the city lies predominantly in our perception which has been influenced and limited (though not necessarily negatively) by our upbringing, from the media to familial traditional opinions instilled. Bachelard has taught us ‘that we do not live in a homogenous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. In the later iterations of the design, the project explores the idea of extending an existing facade as a prison wall but nonetheless is translucent and permeable. It maintains the singularity of the wall and encapsulates and encloses the contents within, but does so more in an urban context that doesn’t involve a physically and visually solid wall. Another aspect that was explored was with taking the ideas and typology from the context, in this case the city, and applying it with the prison program. So far, a variety of walls have been looked at which involve a separation that happens between two objects standing opposite each other.
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The other option is a vertical wall that takes from the idea of office skyscrapers with large lobbies that create a spatial divide height-wise (in the z-direction of a Cartesian model, instead of x or y). This application makes a comment at the office typology which stems from the ideal prison model of Foucault’s Disciplinary Societies. The panopticon was the ideal model to separate individuals and allow for society to become docile, in theory, could be applicable to other types of programs beyond the prison institution. These are seen in office spaces in a much less big-brother watchtower manner but the principle exists in present societies nonetheless. There is architectural precedence of contemporary tower prisons in the city; one in particular is the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Chicago. The prison is located on the higher floors of the building with plant and office spaces separating the inmates from the pedestrian level. It also consists of a forecourt that was originally covered with landscaping and trees, but was removed due to security concerns. From the onset, one would never be aware of the fact of the program when you look at it amongst the backdrop of other skyscrapers. However, the forecourt bears no beneficial aspect to the city other than providing a visually barren surrounding around the base as another mental wall, and would appear to rarely be inhabited by the public.
To conclude, the idea of a prison in the city isn’t foreign or new, but what matters now is how the wall is dealt without creating the tension that can be seen in many other examples outside of a prison. There are ways as seen in the architectural precedent that offers the program in the city but at the cost of removing the public domain altogether. The wall needs to allow a level of permeability and acceptance to happen between the city and the prison, and can only do so only via a state of trust between the law and inhabitants of the prison and the peoples of the city.
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Metropolitan Correctional Centre, 71 W. Van Buren St, Chicago Harry Weese 1975
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the building’s massive stonework and high, forbidding walls served a triple purpose:
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to keep prisones from escaping
a vertical wall instead of horizontal
to prevent assaults from outside by citizen symptahisers
allocating a space for protests or civil unrest to occur so it becomes more controlled and contained
to deter citizens from commiting crimes (by the architecture’s grim appearance)
historically proven to be unsuccessful, otherwise, prisons would’ve constinued existing in the city
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ in “Negotiations”, 1995 - Michel Foucault, ‘Panoptism’ in “Discipline and Punish: The Birth”, 1991 - Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ in “Diacritics”, vol.16 no.1, 1986 - Norman Johnston, ‘Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture’, 2000 - Sarah Kaufman, ‘The Criminalisation of New Orleans in Katrina’s Wake’, June 11 2006, http://www.understandingkatrina.ssrc.org - Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ in “Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 2002 - Michael Sorkin, ‘Introduction: Up Against the Wall’ in “Against the Wall: Israel’s Baarrier to Peace”, 2005 - Margeret Weidenhofer, ‘The Convict Years: Transportation and the Penal System’, 1973
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