Carceral Architecture

When architecture serves as a tool for punishment through confinement and isolation, every design choice affects lives. What is prison architecture? Where do spaces of incarceration from jails to migration camps and beyond materialize? How do their spatial logics haunt our contemporary societies? For the first time, Carceral Architecture offers readers an account of prison design and its effects by centering the voices of people impacted by the correctional system in the United States alongside those of activists, architects, designers, scholars, artists, and students. In so doing, it highlights a much-neglected issue of our time and helps reimagine a society that continues to be marked by the reality of mass incarceration.

With contributions by Amy Mielke, Andrea Armstrong, Anna Arabindan Kesson, Basile Baudez, Charlie McWeeny, Christopher Etienne, Christopher Talib Charriez, Dolfinette Martin, Een Jabriel,Élisabeth Lusset, Ennead Lab, Ess Pokornowski, Falk Bretschneider, Grégoire Korganow, Ibrahim Sulaimani, Isabelle Bonzom, Isabelle Heullant-Donat, Ithaka S+R, Jessica Womack, Jill Stockwell, Joel Negron, Juan Moreno Haines, Katie Chizuko Solien, Kennedy Mattes, MASS Design Group, Myriam Taylor Fair, Nafeesah Goldsmith, (Per) Sister, Regina Chen, rl Goldberg, Sam Johnson, Sarah Lopez, Sowande’ Mustakeem, Spencer Weinreich, Syrita Seib, Tammy Ortiz (Ithaka S+R), and Victoria Bergbauer

• A groundbreaking critical analysis of the architecture of jails, prisons, and beyond
• A diverse collection of voices from experts and scholars to activists and incarcerated individuals
• Includes an addendum with historical and pedagogical tools
• With a foreword by New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman

Basile Baudez is associate professor of architectural history in the Art & Archaeology department at Princeton University. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European architecture and focuses on the role of architecture in politics and society.

Victoria Bergbauer is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. She is currently completing her dissertation, which will offer the first transnational history of the formerly incarcerated.