Revelatory Reformation

The task of this conceptual studio with Vito Acconci was to design a prison of some kind. I conceived a church-state partnership wherein the church would build and run prisons to the mutual benefit of each. This arrangement would ease the financial burden on the state while allowing the church to transform prisoners into pilgrims, reforming offenders by guiding them to God and bringing them into the faith. The concept afforded the opportunity to study religious architecture and investigate religious formmaking.

The design project then became a question of how architecture might bring a person to God. Avoiding existing forms and symbols of the church, its sacred geometry was derived from the holy trinity, a triangle, and it utilized the essential Gothic devices of height and light. It ultimately took the form of an endless upward ascent, a skyward pilgrimage culminating in a spiritual revelation. The architecture became built myth, a setting for prisoners to carry out their own ritual enactment of the monomyth or hero’s journey.

OrganizationStudio 5, Professor Vito AcconciLocationPratt InstituteDate2011