ABOLITION ARCHITECTURE

This seminar introduces students to architectural and environmental histories of abolition through constructed environments, spatial practices, and texts from the eighteenth century to the present. The course locates abolition in social movements and historical discourses, examining the roles that both reform and radical refusal have played in struggles for spatial justice by considering debates around enslavement, prisons, and borders. The course situates abolition as a significant intersectional feminist problem, and conceptually core to the consideration of race in global architectural history. We examine individual and collective works of architecture, art, landscape, and material culture, which highlight incarceration and the production of enclosure within the institutions that have shaped them in various parts of the world, and as elements of the formation of space, power, and knowledge in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

The seminar is structured around multiple full-book engagements. We will closely read three texts that are foundational to the literature on abolition and architecture: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis; Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore; and Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood. These readings are complemented by articles and other shorter texts, and works of art and architecture, which help to contextualize and draw out the themes of the course. Each student leads seminars on the readings and builds on this foundation by engaging in independent research, culminating in a long-format paper that intervenes in the discourse or frames a narrative, presenting an architectural history of abolition.