site/program proposal [1st pass]

site:Rikers Island
program: Prison

Entered only via the Rikers Island Bridge, it has grown autonomously as New York City’s secret ghetto. With its own schools, clinics, ball fields, chapels and mosques, tailor shop, bus depot, power plant, bakery, and carwash, Rikers may appear like a typical Queens neighborhood. But, it is precisely designed under specific rules and laws and is also designed to be self-sufficient and self-contained. The electrical blackout in 1977 did not affect Rikers. It has the means to carry on and survive. In this ‘total institution’, this massive drive for autonomy adds to the isolation. The Rock, in thought and action, is truly a separate world. Such a site is compelling because it has this symbiosis of top-down authoritarian control and the illicit underground informal networks that are not present in most urban conditions.

Urbanism is characterized by the cognitive relationship between individuals and their built environment as well as the infrastructural relationship between populations and formal institutions of power. The existing urban condition in Rikers is one of laws and autonomy. Yet, operating under this restrictive infrastructure, Rikers reveals the existence of illicit, informal networks that operate within these controlled spaces.

Though often, these informal networks are perceived as harmful or even a breach of security; they can also be be beneficial. While the population and formal power structures are always present in the urban context, the informal networks are novel and subversive exhibiting flexible, transient, and emergent characteristics. Their flexibility responds to changing situations by dynamically altering goals, self-organization, and resources. In this context, robust architecture is not an extensive dichotomy between either a top-down system of formal structures or a bottom-up system of a group of individuals, but rather an intensive synthesis of the positive aspects of each system. This precarious balance between the authoritarian and subversive needs to exploited in the redefinition of a place of incarceration.