Reading Andy Battle’s terrifying article on Rikers (“Metaphor Machine,” #40), I was greatly impressed by the research approach and how it revealed the depth and breadth of the problem we face in the States. My work Institution and Home: Architecture as a Cultural Medium (2006) explores the spatial implications of dwelling forms from a research perspective—it develops a gradient from domestic to oppressive institutional settings, although it doesn’t get into architecture that tortures as Battle’s article does. When grasped in all its spatial and social ramifications, this structure is unbearably destructive and truly scary.
Your publication, however, is wonderful, although a very rich diet of thoughts—so rich that I wonder, if I subscribe, will it sit tantalizingly on my mail table along with the latest and not-yet-read issues of the New Yorker, Archaeology, and other journals I currently subscribe to?
Worth the risk!