ABSTRACT
Architecture as Subject-Maker: The Case of the Prison
“A prisoner paints a landscape on the wall of his cell showing a miniature train entering
a tunnel. When his jailers come to get him, he asks them ‘politely to wait a moment, to
allow me to verify something in the little train in my picture. As usual, they started to
laugh, because they considered me to be weak-minded. I made myself very tiny, entered
into my picture and climbed into the little train, which started moving, then disappeared
into the darkness of the tunnel. For a few seconds longer, a bit of flaky smoke could be
seen coming out of the round hole. Then this smoke blew away, and with it the picture,
and with the picture, my person…’ ”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958) citing Hermann Hesse, Fontaine (1945)
In 1750 England’s most infamous prison was Newgate, an overcrowded, verminous gaol
buried in the defensive walls of London. To passersby, Newgate was discernable as a
prison only for its street-side begging grate, from which Londoners could hear the wails
of debtors and felons awaiting trial and execution. Architecturally-speaking, Newgate’s
facade, as well as its internal arrangement, was indistinguishable from contemporaneous
secular buildings. One hundred years later, however, this was no longer true for Newgate
or any gaol. By 1850 reformers had institutionalized the English prison, and it emerged
as a distinct architectural type. The new model prison was London’s machine-like,
rigorously-designed Pentonville that embodied the reformers’ principles of surveillance
and isolation. The begging grate of Newgate, the space through which not only voices but
goods and capital were exchanged, was nowhere to be found at Pentonville. Pentonville’s
architecture made it as severed from the city as its prisoners were from each other. For
the first time the role of architecture had expanded (sometimes subtly but often plainly)
beyond art and beyond utility to include human control.1
Significantly, the design techniques that prisons employed then and today are not
restricted to penal institutions. Since the nineteenth century, the methods through which
architecture has managed sanitation, observation and security in prisons have been
adopted for modern hospitals, factories, schools, housing and planning. Yet the prison,
a lowly, frequently overlooked typology, remains the space where architecture, for
better or worse, most realizes its capacity to construct subjects, affect behaviors and
even define morality.
I first became interested in prisons in a studio that explored the relationship between
architecture, institutions and human subjectivity. I believe strongly in architecture’s
ability to make, break or transform us as human subjects from the general (i.e. a citizen)
to the specific (i.e. a high-security felon)—but how exactly does architecture do this?
GEORGE G. BOOTH TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP
How does architecture produce a person that is both a citizen and a high-security felon,
or that is one or the other? Furthermore, how does architecture produce an entire society
of subjects?
To probe these questions, the project will use prisons as a lens to explore the following
architectural themes related to subject formation: (1) sanitation, (2) observation and (3)
security. Beginning in England, the birthplace of the modern penal institution, I will
travel through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, visiting and
researching one “primary” prison per country. Whether it be the Netherlands’s Arnhem
Prison (one of the world’s few built panopticons), Denmark’s Horsens State Prison (an
archetype of post-reform era institutions) or Belgium’s Beveren Prison (one of a group of
high-tech, newly built facilities in northern Europe), each “primary” prison exemplifies a
particular penal typology. Visits to other prisons and museums will provide supplemental
research. (It should be noted that I have selected only publicly accessible prisons.)
I estimate the cost of the trip, to be taken in fall 2015, to be $9,000:
$1,350 – Roundtrip airfare (New York to London and Copenhagen to New York)
$6,300 – $150 per day for food, hostel lodging and local transportation for 42 days
$650 – Eurail Select Pass
$150 – Eurostar train London to Paris
$200 – Roundtrip airfare (New York to Ann Arbor)
$350 – Exhibition printing and material costs
Thank you kindly for your consideration. I am passionately hopeful for this opportunity.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth J. Nichols
Date of birth: August 9, 1988
Phone: (757) 810 5905
Email: Elizabeth.j.nichols@gmail.com
Address: 680 Manhattan Avenue, Apartment 22, Brooklyn, NY 11222
1
Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 1–8.
ELIZABETH NICHOLS
PROPOSAL
In addition to a travel blog, the research will take two forms: a small-format publication
and large-format drawings. While there does exist survey texts on the history of prisons,
such as Johnston Norman’s Forms of Constraints (2003), there is no accessible, graphicallyrich publication that allows one to compare penal institutions across time and space
in architectural terms. This is partly because the work of documenting prisons falls to
photographers and journalists. Therefore, I would like to publish (online and in print)
the research of the six prisons in a format similar to WORKac’s 49 Cities (2009) with
original text, drawings, diagrams and photographs. With the publication as a foundation,
the large-format drawings will be a means to examine architecture and subject formation
through unconstrained, unsystematic means.
1
2
1 HER MAJESTY PRISON DARTMOOR, DEVON, ENGLAND (1812)
Days 01–10
Fly New York to London
See Newgate Prison, the Clink Museum and the Tower of London and conduct research
at the British Library and the Royal Institute of British Architects in London
See Her Majesty Prison Dartmoor in Devon
See Malmaison Oxford in Oxford
See Buckingham Old Gaol in Buckingham (time permitting)
2 LA SANTÉ PRISON, PARIS, FRANCE (1867)
Days 11–16
Train London to Paris
See La Santé Prison in Paris
See the National Museum of Prisons in Fontainebleau
3 BEVEREN PRISON, BEVEREN, BELGIUM (2013)
Days 17–22
Train Paris to Ghent
Conduct research on the Maison de Force in Ghent
See Beveren Prison in Beveren (near Arnhem)
3
4
4 ARNHEM PRISON, ARNHEM, THE NETHERLANDS (1886)
Days 23–29
Train Antwerp to Arnhem (or Breda)
See Breda Prison in Breda (time permitting)
See Arnhem Prison in Arnhem/Antwerp
See Haarlem Prison and the Bijlmerbajes prison complex in Amsterdam
5 STASI PRISON, BERLIN, GERMANY (1939)
5
6
Days 30–36
Train Arnhem (or Amsterdam) to Berlin
See Stasi Prison and the Moabit Prison Historical Park in Berlin
See JVA Fuhlsbuettel prison complex in Hamburg
6 HORSENS STATE PRISON, HORSENS, DENMARK (1853)
Days 37–42
Train Berlin (or Hamburg) to Horsens
See Horsens State Prison and the East Jutland State Prison in Horsens
Fly Copenhagen to New York
GEORGE G. BOOTH TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP
ELIZABETH NICHOLS
PORTFOLIO | STITCHING ARCHITECTURE
Jason Young
Y E A R 2013–2014
P R O J E C T M.Arch thesis exploring architectural representation in the context of today’s
post-natural “blend” of man, nature and machine (continues on the following two pages).
CRITIC
GEORGE G. BOOTH TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP
ELIZABETH NICHOLS
PORTFOLIO | STITCHING ARCHITECTURE (CONT.)
Medieval Christian ideology posited man and nature as a single entity under the umbrella
of God. Today in the Anthropocene, we will see a return to “oneness” and an erasure of the
longstanding perspective of dualism established during the Renaissance. Today as smartphones
extend our bodies, man, nature and machine will again be conceived of as a single entity
(now under the umbrella of post-nature). The project explores architectural representation in
the context of today’s merging of man, nature and machine. It is a post-natural “gardenscape”
with a set of architectural characters...
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ELIZABETH NICHOLS
PORTFOLIO | STITCHING ARCHITECTURE (CONT.)
...The gardenscape functions to produce human subjectivities that are both animalistic
(“subjective”) and machinic (“objective”). A blurring of animalism and machinism is
achieved by both the architecture of the imagined spaces and the techniques used to represent
those spaces. Each drawing couples perspective (“subjective”) drawing with plan and section
(“objective”) drawing. There is no site plan. Rather, the drawings relate to one another through
the architectural characters. Human subjects barely occupy the imaged spaces; they are as
unsure of their place in the gardenscape as we are in the Anthropocene today.
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ELIZABETH NICHOLS
PORTFOLIO | SELECTED MODELS
2011–2014
P R O J E C T S Selected models completed while at Taubman College. Clockwise from
upper left: Villa Müller visitor center, scale 1:50; staircase, scale 1:10; leather and suede
wall pocket, scale 1:1; 3D-printed scale figures; facade study, scale 1:300; pool installation
diagram; walled maze, scale 1:500; theater, scale 1:50; Water Thief Housing massing, scale
1:1000; facade study, scale 1:300; prison concept model, scale 1:100; PETG vacuum form
study; pool installation (with collaborator Peter Halquist), scale 1:100.
YEAR
GEORGE G. BOOTH TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP
ELIZABETH NICHOLS
CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
EXPERIENCE
University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
M.Arch. with Distinction. Ann Arbor, MI, 2011–2014
Taubman College Merit Scholarship. 2013–2014
Linn and Grace Smith Memorial Scholarship. 2012–2013
Architecture + Adaptation Research Travel Studio. Jakarta, Indonesia, 2012
REX Architecture
Junior Architect. New York, NY, September 2014–Present
Necklace Residence. Lloyd Harbor, NY
Vanderbilt University
B.A. History of Art. Nashville, TN, 2006–2010
Frances and John Downing Research Travel Award. London, England, 2009
Harvard University, Career Discovery Program. Cambridge, MA, 2009
University of Auckland, Study Abroad Program. Auckland, New Zealand, 2008
TEACHING
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Arch 323 History of Architecture. Instructor for Assoc. Prof. A. Herscher. 2014
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Arch 589 Site Operations. Instructor for Assoc. Prof. G. Thün. 2013
PUBLICATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS
Contributor. “Menteng” by D. de Cespedes and E. Nichols in Jakarta: Architecture +
Adaptation, eds. A. Bobbette, M. Miller and E. Turpin. 2013
Featured work, exhibition designer. Futures of Hypercomplexity: Bangkok and Jakarta,
Taubman Gallery. Ann Arbor, MI, 2013
Contributor. “Jakarta: Design Research and the Futures of Hypercomplexity” by A.
Bobbette, M. Miller and E. Turpin in MONU 17: New Urbanisms. 2012
Featured work. Navigating the Postnatural, Salt + Cedar Gallery. Detroit, MI, 2012
Featured work, exhibition designer. Cities of Hypercomplexity: Bangkok and Jakarta,
Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Ann Arbor, MI, 2012
Editor. Dimensions 25, eds. R. Chhabra, N. Mattson, E. Kutil, E. Nichols and S. Scharrer
(received the Center for Architecture Foundation’s Douglas Haskell Award for Student
Journals, Honorable Mention). 2012
Featured work. Taubman College Student Show, CMYK Gallery. Ann Arbor, MI, 2012
(received Second Place), 2013 and 2014
GEORGE G. BOOTH TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP
Leong Leong Architecture
Architectural Intern. New York, NY, August 2014
Competition for the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Los Angeles, CA
Lee and Macgillivray Architecture Studio
Designer. Ann Arbor, MI, November 2013–January 2014
Competition for the 2014 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. Long Island City, NY
Adams + Gilpin Design Studio
Designer. Ann Arbor, MI, May–August 2013
Plum Market Cart Corral. Ann Arbor, MI
“Understanding the Role of the Built Environment for Mobility through Technology,”
University of Michigan MCubed Grant, Ann Arbor, MI
MILLIGRAM-office
Curatorial Assistant. Ann Arbor, MI, March–April 2013
“Rights of Way: Mobility and the City” at the Boston Society of Architects, Boston, MA
Studio Daniel Libeskind
Architectural Intern. New York, NY, June–July 2012
Redevelopment masterplan for Archipelago 21. Yongsan Business Distric, Seoul, Korea
Century Spire. Manila, Philippines
L Tower. Toronto, Canada
Habitat for Humanity International
Builder. Phnom Phen, Cambodia and Chiang Mai, Thailand, April–May 2011
Sun Chang Schools
English Language Teacher. Gwangju, Korea, July 2010–February 2011
Smithsonian Institution Archives
Book Conservation Intern. Washington, DC, June–August 2007 and 2008
ELIZABETH NICHOLS