After working for over a year soliciting and sourcing material, it's exciting to be able to announce that ADPSR's exhibit "Sentenced: Architecture and Human Rights" is open at the Wurster Gallery at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design! The show highlights problematic and little-known spaces within United States prisons and detention centers that house activities deemed to violate human rights: execution chambers, supermax prisons, and juvenile isolation cells.
Do these spaces provide for an appropriate punishment for unacceptable behavior, or are they themselves part of the problem? Visitors will have a chance to see rarely available documentation including architectural plans of execution chambers, drawings from people held in solitary isolation, and photographs of the interiors of juvenile detention centers. What do these extreme spaces of containment have to teach us about the state of freedom in our broader American society?
We had an excellent opening night where a capacity crowd turned out to hear a panel featuring journalist and solitary confinement survivor Sarah Shourd, UC Berkeley architecture professor Jill Stoner -- one of the leaders of the campus-wide "Prison course -- and ADPSR President Raphael Sperry.
Congratulations to curator and correspondent extraordinaire Lisbet Portman; thanks to our contributors, who opened a window into a hidden and dangerous world; and thanks to our sponsors, who helped to spread the word about the opening event, provided refreshments, and provided the large-format printing for the exhibition materials:
