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Architecture

The Architecture of Assassination

  The former Texas School Book Depository, now the Dallas County Administration Building (original image: Jim Bowen via Wikimedia commons) On November 22, 1963, a pall was cast over the country that some people say we’ve never emerged from. It is thought to represent a loss of innocence, or at the very least, a loss […]

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Architecture

The Daring Escape From the Eastern State Penitentiary

  “How 12 convicts escaped by tunnel from Eastern Penitentiary,” Diagram of the Tunnel published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 3, 1945 (image: Philadelphia Inquirer via Easter State Penitentiary) Eastern State Penitentiary opened its gates in 1829. It was devised by The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, an organization of powerful Philadelphia […]

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Architecture

Space, Crime, and Architecture

The most recent issue of Plat, an independent architectural journal published by students at Rice School of Architecture, features an essay I wrote with two of my fellow M.E.D. classmates. “Space, Crime, and Architecture” elaborates on some of the issues we discussed in our 2011 Yale School of Architecture research colloquium of the same name. […]

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Architecture

Breaking Out and Breaking In Panel Discussion at Studio-X

On Monday April 30, Columbia University’s Studio-X NYC is hosting the final panel to wrap up the Breaking Out and Breaking In distributed film fest. The discussion will bring together film, architecture, crime, history, and the FBI. Panelists include special Agent Brenda Cotton, Bank Robbery Coordinator for the FBI’s Bank Robbery/Kidnapping/Extortion Squad; Thomas McShane, Retired […]

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Architecture

Breaking Out and Breaking In: An Architectural Film Fest

What does a heist reveal about bank design? What can architects learn from a prison break? What happens when we view the criminal act as an especially transgressive mode of architectural criticism? Crime has the potential to reveal new facets of architecture. It exposes unexpected spatial narratives and subverts conventional readings of the designed environment. […]