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It's part of the larger situation that the buildings created by large bureaucracies all look about the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was my criteria as well and the only one that failed me was https://www.holmesmiller.com/project/hmp-grampian Which looks really nice for a prison. I suspect it is an administrative building, or just the entrance. Not the place where inmates actually live.
It shows no windows at all, beyond the reception area.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is certainly a sound explanation – but is it a good one? If we optimize school buildings and prison buildings in a way that they end up being indistinguishable from one another, maybe we should reconsider the metrics we are optimizing for.
I'm not sure I get what's the problem with schools and prisons looking the same. Prisons should look like the rest of the world after all, they're supposed to be places where you learn to function in society.
That's not my takeaway, after looking at these photos though.
What’s the point being made here? That if you take a picture of a building from a specific angle it’s difficult to tell the function of the building?
Here's a really good article to explain the consequences of schools being the holding pens which they are: http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? Michel Foucault
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is because tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, whether a hospital school or prison. It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. A one-story hospital would be prohibitively expensive to build in an urban area, and it is not like healthcare is not already too expensive.
Foucault is explicitly referring to norms of behavior, not the shapes of buildings: - regular chronologies - forced labour - authorities of surveillance and registration
You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppression, that all regular chronologies favored by the dominant culture is oppression, that all authority figures are oppressive etc... But it's difficult to imagine a thriving, post-industrial society not featuring some of those things.
Even looking back in history, people have self-organized into hierarchical, regimented systems. I think a lot of this is just a natural reaction to our environment, which is also dictated by regular chronologies (days, lunar cycle, seasons), necessary labor (biological need for food and shelter) and implicit authority figures (parents).
Public school is a prison where both parents can abandon their children to be raised by strangers while the parents chase what they really love: money. We make ourselves feel better by teaching them a few worthwhile things during their minimum 13 years in lockdown, coupled with a massive public jobs program, but most of it is a waste of precious family time where parents should be teaching and loving their own childr…