America holds more than two million inmates in its prisons and jails, and hosts more than two million daily visits to museums, figures which represent a ten-fold increase in the last twenty-five years. Corrections and Collections explores and connects these two massive expansions in our built environment.
Author Joe Day shows how institutions of discipline and exhibition have replaced malls and office towers as the anchor tenants of U.S. cities. Prisons and museums, though diametrically opposed in terms of public engagement, class representation, and civic pride, are complementary structures, employing related spatial and visual tactics to secure and array problematic citizens or priceless treasures. Our recent demand for museums and prisons has encouraged architects to be innovative with their design, and experimental with their scale and distribution through our cities. Contemporary museums are the petri dishes of advanced architectural speculation; prisons remain the staging grounds for every new technology of constraint and oversight.
Now that criminal and creative transgression are America’s defining civic priorities, Corrections and Collections will recalibrate your assumptions about art, architecture, and urban design.
Foreword Introduction: To Seduce or Subdue? Minimal 1. Reduce: Exhibiting Discipline: The Aesthetics of Deprivation and Duration 2. Repeat: Compounded Interest? Serial, Multiple, and Redundant Institutions Post-Minimal 3. Rotate: The Panopticon and Guggenheim: Axioms of Visual Regimentation 4. Proliferate: Avatars of a Polarized Future: Thomas Krens and Don Novey Millennial 5. Neutralize: METs, MoMAs, and MCCs: The New Metropolitan Peacemakers 6. Privatize: Pay-to-Play: Personal Museums and For-Profit Prisons Post-Millennial 7. Collide: PRI/MUS: Prisons-turned-Museums and the Museum-as-Crime-Scene 8. Disperse: Holding Patterns: Transnational Art and Extra-territorial Detention 9. Conclusion: Afterlives Notes Image Credits Acknowledgments Index
Biography
Joe Day is the design principal of Deegan-Day Design and is a visiting faculty member for architectural design, history, and theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles, USA.
"The unexpected connections made by Day are linked creatively with the sound logic of a true authority. At one point he juxtaposes Oscar Wilde and Public Enemy and questions man's attraction to both seduction and punishment. Embedded in the prose are aphoristic statements, like "to find the future listen for acronyms." Filled with insightful observations on contemporary urbanism, Day is a longtime SCI-Arc professor and has also taught at Yale." – Mike Sonksen, KCET
"Highly original and provocative book by LA-based architect Joe Day that explores the societal and architectural connections between two institutions that have expanded tenfold since the 1970s: museums and prisons." – Frances Anderton, Design & Architecture
"Joe Day, an accomplished architect and academic teaching at SCI-Arc and Yale, presents a daunting traverse through the dialectical territory between visual pleasure and psychological pain. His taxonomy of meticulous diagrams and carefully curated photographs of the subject buildings relentlessly synthesizes and interrogates the nuances that transect our most dominant socio-cultural edifices within late-capital: museums and prisons." – John Southern, Archinect
"…a fascinating new book by Joe Day, an L.A. architect who teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, charts not just the history of jails but the surprisingly broad — and telling — overlap between prison and museum design." – Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
"... Corrections and Collections is an exploration of themese of concealment and display, an intellectual pursuit soon surely to inform new buildings by this enviably erudite architect." - Raymund Ryan, The Architectural Review
