Introducing Season 3: On Violence, Crime, Justice

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon got me thinking about the function of design in exercising power and control in society – even though rotundas preceded the panopticon and contemporary prisons have since evolved into newer typologies. I dug deeper and immersed myself in the vast pool of knowledge existing around the themes of violence, punishment, surveillance and crime – awkwardly jumping from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. While I came out enlightened at the end of these books, I was left wondering what the current discourses in architecture are, when it comes to addressing these themes.

Season 3 of Architecture Off-Centre positions itself as a provocation to examine the relationship of architecture with violence, crime and justice through conversations with historians, writers, lawyers, artists, forensic psychologists and, of course, architects.