Art, architecture, and incarceration collide in essays on prison design from the Panopticon to the Golden Gulag.
As unprecedented hunger strikes continue at Guantánamo Bay and in California federal prisons, two recent features on Places explore the politics and aesthetics of prison design.
In an essay adapted from his book Corrections and Collections, Joe Day compares the proliferation of American prisons and museums since the 1960s and finds intriguing parallels in how institutional architectures have responded to cultural movements from Minimalism to post-Millenialism. Art and crime collide in buildings from Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon through Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim to contemporary work by Peter Zumthor, Rem Koolhaas and others.
In Geographies of Detention, adapted from an exhibition at the California Museum of Photography, Catherine Gudis and Molly McGarry present art and documentary work, by Sandow Birk, Alyse Emdur, Richard Ross and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, that investigates prison landscapes.
FULL STORY: Corrections and Collections
Eastern State Penitentiary: A Class about the Past Speaks to the Present and the Future
Built as an embodiment of the ideals of prison reformers, the Eastern State Penitentiary had running water and central heating before the White House, and housed the first synagogue built in an American prison.
Do the 'Art Everywhere' Billboards Support Art, or Advertising?
With so many eyes trained obsessively on mobile phones, the outdoor industry is supporting a campaign to place famous art on billboards around the country. Will people notice? Should they?
Coming to a Billboard Near You: The 'Art Everywhere' Project
Voting for a new project called "Art Everywhere" is currently open to the public on works from five of the country’s largest and most respected museums. The vote will help decide which images get placed on some 50,000 billboards this summer.
Red Cities, Blue Cities, and Crime
Homicides rose across the nation in 2020 and 2021. But did they rise equally in all cities, or was the situation worse in some than in others?
The Shifting Boomer Bulge: More Bad News for America’s Housing Crisis?
In the first of a two-part series, PlaceMakers’ Ben Brown interviews housing guru Arthur C. Nelson on the sweeping demographic changes complicating the housing market.
A Serious Critique of Congestion Costs and Induced Vehicle Travel Impacts
Some highway advocates continue to claim that roadway expansions are justified to reduce traffic congestion. That's not what the research shows. It's time to stop obsessing over congestion and instead strive for efficient accessibility.
Tolling All Lanes
Bay Area transportation planners are studying a radical idea to reduce traffic congestion and fund driving alternatives: tolling all lanes on a freeway. Even more radical, the plan considers tolling parallel roads.
Federal SMART Grants Awarded for Transportation Safety, Equity Projects
The grant program focuses on the use of technology to improve safety, accessibility, and efficiency in transportation.
Fare Enforcement Upheld by Washington Supreme Court
But using armed police to enforce fare payment is less than ideal in the eyes of the top court in the state of Washington.
City of Greenville
City of Greenville
Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) AmeriCorps Program
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact: Mobility, Community, Possibility
City of Spearfish
City of Lomita
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
