“Tearing Down the Walls”
‘High walls, no light, segregated from the society, prisons have for a
long time a place of confinement and punishment. No walls, ample light, placed
in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD is the prison we propose as a place of
rehabilitation and reintegration with the society.’
Despite prison population
and recidivism significantly
increasing over the last decade, the incarceration
structure in Australia has failed to see advancements throughout the past
century and desperately requires innovation and re-imagination. This debate creates an
opportunity to rethink the future of prisons design. This is evidently shown through
the locations of prisons at the edges away from the city, framing the negative perception that
prisoners are transported away akin to garbage.
The thesis attempts to
challenge negative preconceived notions of “PRISONS” to re-instil an urban
penitentiary type into the city fabric that is desirable, focusing on the
prison ‘wall’ and what it means to be in the city?
The idea of a prison in the city isn’t
foreign or new;
But by putting the new type back into the
city, will the architecture play the dominant role it once did historically?
How would this proposal
for a new prison type change negative perceptions of the prison on a multitude
of many levels?
This occurs primarily
with the prison wall.
A
‘Wall’ is defined as ‘a continuous structure that encloses or divides an area
of land’. 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.
At present, the “prison walls” are located
in the outskirts of civilization consists of either a barren tall concrete wall
or even just a tall fence as there is very little impact on the surrounding
context and people to take into consideration.
The
new prison 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 urban
dwellers.
Only then, can the intervention start to
be-apart of the city morphology, the hidden gem that increases the value of its
surrounding properties.
The
investigations on graffiti and street art reveals its potential as means of
education as well as a medium of social blurring and breaking of social
hierarchies. Music and film bring together a vast mix of
people ranging from identical to polar opposites. The roles of both the prison and society are mutually
interrelated. Rewriting the typical
prison schedule through the prison-program generator, it becomes catalytic for
the emergence of other programmatic hybrids such as places for living, education,
art, agriculture and even sporting facilities which in turn could contribute to
society and its surrounding urban context. Where the re-defined ground plane
and wall meet, it becomes a means of social connectivity, forging a network of links that engages
with its adjacent site context of Queen Victoria market, Flagstaff Gardens
and the CBD.
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