IIT | Fall 2015
Carcarem in Horto
Project Location: 71 W. Van Buren St. Chicago, IL, 60605
Instructor(s): Andrew St. Lucia
Solo Project
The city of Chicago has long been regarded as a city of great architecture. When the International Style of modernism first moved to America, it was to Chicago; when Frank Lloyd Wright developed his timeless “Prarie Style”, it was in and around the neighborhoods of Chicago; and around the world, when we look for an example on developing new cities, skyscrapers and ways of living, we look to Chicago.
But amidst the renowed works of Mies, Sullivan, Wright, and Root, sits an anomolous building, a striking opposition to the vibrant city around it. Characterized by it’s narrow windows, triangular plan, and austere concrete facade, the Metropolitan Correctional Center is one of a very small number of U.S. prisons located in or near major population centers. It’s style and it’s location set the MCC apart as a monolithic emblem of incarceration and an unmissable landmark for the city.
This sequence of images is intended to explore the relationship between the prison and it’s city, investigating the strangness of incarcerating 622 individuals within a stone throw Michigan avenue. The images, like the building, are intended to be uncomfortable, accessing the sensations of separation and coarseness implied by the MCC. A special focus was given to visualizing the distinction between inside and out; between the free and the imprisoned.
As our national awareness of the problems posed by mass incarceration grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that the existing approaches to crime and punishment are no longer suited to our societies values. The cost of the modern justice system is the very lives of the people we pretend to protect and rehablitate. The Metropolitan Correctional Center is nothing if not an icon of this outdated modality, but maybe, if we were able to truly see it, for all it’s brutality, symbolism, and strangness, we might begin to ask what exactly it’s role is in the great and beautiful city of Chicago, and what it’s role is in our cities future.
