AT RECESS 02: CARCERAL ARCHITECTURE

Please join us for the second At Recess, an ongoing series hosted by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, celebrating books, architecture, and urban culture. Each session invites authors, editors, and designers to present their recent publications and engage in open conversation about the ideas shaping contemporary architecture and the built environment.

At Recess 02 marks the Los Angeles launch of Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls by Basile Baudez and Victoria Bergbauer (JOVIS).

Architecture is never neutral—but what makes architecture carceral? Where do spaces of incarceration materialize, and how do their spatial logics haunt contemporary society? This book brings these questions to the fore. Prisons are hidden from public view, and incarcerated people disappear behind blind walls. Questions of location, materiality, volume, sound, and circulation—standard considerations for any other building type—are rarely taught or debated in this context. Architects avoid carceral commissions, and when they accept them, seldom acknowledge them. Underfunded and left to contractors, carceral facilities in the United States remain largely absent from both architectural and public discourse. For the first time, this volume places the architecture of confinement at the center of the conversation.

visit website