Photo-Illustration: Tutor Perini
It’s a staple of comedy and complaints that an office can feel like a jail. So why not try a jail that feels like an office? The construction contractor Tutor Perini’s new video rendering shows the future Manhattan Detention Center, which will be built on the site of its predecessor near Chinatown, as a staunchly generic high-rise, its function undetectable to passers-by. It’s a facility meant to isolate people, and also to blend in.
The preliminary video, though light on detail or a sense of the building’s height or bulk, shows a tower said to be about 300 feet high at 124-125 White Street with all the usual corporate appurtenances. Glass walls line the sidewalk; a landscaped plaza is lit from the cantilevered structure above; a grid of generous vertical windows is framed in handsome steel (or maybe that’s Disney-ish terra-cotta); a blond-wood open lobby leads to a reception desk unprotected by bulletproof glass. New York has plenty of other buildings that look more obviously prisonlike than this.
Photo-Illustration: Tutor Perini
Photo-Illustration: Tutor Perini
Photo-Illustration: Tutor Perini
These drawings are evidently meant to reassure Chinatown residents who worry that a borough jail will be a forbiddingly alien presence, a keep without a castle, plunked down in a city street. That’s what the Tombs looked like, after all, at least in its most recent incarnation. The new house of sorrows, on the other hand, suggests the sort of place a white-collar perpetrator might do a little light embezzling before being led straight from cubicle to cell, stopping off at the employee cafeteria on the way.
The current jail, now being demolished.
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
What the set of renderings doesn’t show, however, is what the building will actually look like. A placeholder rather than a full-fledged design, it articulates what the president might call a concept of a plan. Think of it as designlessness by design, a vague and anonymous proposal by a company that mostly builds infrastructure. There’s a reason we’re getting architecture without architects: professional stigma. In 2020, at the height of the “defund the police” movement, the American Institute of Architects issued a statement forbidding its members from designing spaces for execution or solitary confinement. The New York chapter also strongly discouraged them from working on any “spaces of incarceration” at all. “I don’t think there are moral or ethical ways in which architects can support the justice system that is foundationally concerned with the oppression of Black and brown people,” Bryan Lee, a design principal at the anti-incarceration collective Colloqate, told AIA-NY’s publication Oculus.
Photo-Illustration: Tutor Perini
The mood of the country may have changed, and the AIA’s position may shift again. It may even wind up arguing that for a jail to be humane it needs to be designed by people who know what they’re doing and can communicate effectively with the public. In the meantime, few architects are willing to sully their portfolios with criminal-justice facilities. That doesn’t mean that the next Manhattan Detention Center won’t be designed, built, or paid for in nearly $4 billion of public funds. It only means that if the abuses and mismanagement that doomed Rikers Island metastasize into New York’s more decentralized system, at least the new jail won’t look quite as scary from a distance.