Since Piranesi’s Carceri D’Invenzione, the prison has held darkness, mystery, and fear in the architectural imagination. Bentham’s Panopticon made the prison frame psychological games between inmates and guards; Foucault’s Discipline and Punish linked prison architecture to larger power structures and social attitudes towards punishment. Today, as our collective moral awareness increases, we understand that prison systems everywhere need to be rethought.

Future architectures can transform prisons into places of learning and rehabilitation. “Crossing the Skyline” links Chicago’s largest public library to a nearby federal prison with a library annex: a hybrid space where the public, the incarcerated, and their families can co-exist. Now, this site-specific design can expand to a systemic scale. This project places architects in the criminal justice design conversation, and offers hybrid architectural typologies for social reform that don’t yet exist in our environment.