1.6.04
IRA2
HELL ON EARTH--THE BACK HALF
Jonathan Glancey
Monday 31st May 2004
From the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib,
modern jails are clinical and brutal creations. Designed to disorient
and diminish inmates, the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland embodies
this architectural inhumanity.
By Jonathan Glancey
Donovan Wylie spent 100 days photographing the Maze Prison, ten miles
outside Belfast. Built by the British government in 1976, the
infamous H-block detention centre closed, after peace negotiations,
in October 2003. The buildings continue to stand while Ulster decides
what to do with this sad and dismal place. Soon enough, these miles
of barbed wire and acres of grim concrete will be razed to make way
for - who knows what? A beautiful public park, perhaps. A wildlife
sanctuary. A romantic wilderness. If past examples are anything to go
by, it will probably be reborn as some glum housing estate, a
domestic prison to replace its political predecessor.
Whatever happens to the Maze, Wylie's meticulous, obsessively focused
labour will fix for ever in our minds the numbing banality of prison
life. Whichever way his camera points, the view is all but identical.
Here, 5,000 years of architecture and urban planning have been
reduced to a faceless late 20th-century grid. Here is St John the
Divine's gridiron city, New Jerusalem, described so enticingly in the
Book of Revelations - a thing of gold, onyx and chalcedony - hammered
into a vision of purgatory. Here is a construction designed to rob
life of imagination, flatten seditious thought, steal away humanity,
put an end to time, and even to life itself.
Relentless images of gravelled alleyways set between concrete posts
and look-out towers, of single-storey concrete H-blocks and tiny
white cells, reflect the outlook of those who designed this
architectural white-out: puritanical, zealous and efficient. Parade-
square military. Hair cut. Boots polished. Coal painted white for VIP
visits. Paper clips lined in precise rows. The Maze was,
unforgettably, a place of dirty protest, of shit smeared on walls, of
sporadic violence, sudden arson, assassination, dramatic escape and
of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, starving to death
after 66 foodless days in 1981.
Looking at Wylie's photographs, it is all but impossible to sense
this underlying savagery. Modern prisons, unlike medieval dungeons or
Piranesi's Renaissance fantasies, are chaste-looking places - from
the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib. Inside
such prim walls, torture and sadistic perversions can be indulged, on
innocent and guilty alike.
Execution chambers in US prisons, designed to be as clinical as
possible, share the aesthetic of the operating theatre, or freshly
cleaned motorway service station lavatory. The perversions carried
out in such places are as sick as the crimes committed by the guilty,
as pathetic as the deaths of the innocent. Here are hells of our own
making, walled around in DIY wall tiles.
For all this tide of prison porn, one of the most frightening aspects
of contemporary jails is their unstated aim to reduce inmates to a
hollow state, to lock them up in places that have less character than
a new housing estate in the Thames Gateway. The Maze was a prison
famous throughout the world, a detention centre for loyalist and
republican politicians and gunmen. But as Wylie's pictures show, it
might almost have been anywhere. If the skies were bluer, this might
be Texas; if there was snow on the ground, it might be Russia.
These deliberately repetitive images remind me of Italo Cal-vino's
description of Trude in Invisible Cities (1972): "If on arriving at
Trude I had not read the city's name written in big letters, I would
have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken
off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the
others . . . following the same signs we swung around the same flower
beds in the same squares. Why come to Trude, I asked myself. And I
already wanted to leave. 'You can resume your flight whenever you
like,' they said to me, 'but you will arrive at another Trude,
absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole
Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the
airport changes.'"
Or it reminds me of Patrick McGoohan's rebellious character, Number
6, in the cult 1960s television series "The Prisoner". In the final
episode, No 6 breaks free of the picture-book yet nightmarish prison
village he has been held in, only to discover that he is his own
jailer and that, out of prison, he is still in it.
In Britain today, following the lead of the United States, we are
locking up an increasing number of our people, and for the most petty
of crimes. The desire is, presumably, to keep people under control,
to regiment them, to shut down their imaginations, their capacity to
rebel, if not to commit crime, by banging them up in architecture and
places as vacuous as the Maze.
In a perceptive essay in the book accompanying Wylie's photographs,
Louise Purbrick writes that one of the main purposes of the design of
the Maze was to disorient and diminish prisoners through an infinite
repetition of spaces, materials and control systems. To make the Maze
even more of a non-place, its 2.5 miles of 17ft-high walls were built
on 270 acres of low-lying bog. So even if there had been views of the
outside world, these would have been bleak and minimal. The
prefabricated buildings were as colourless as they could be, although
(a very British touch) they were hung with floral curtains.
Each building, including the chapel, was imprisoned within the
prison, in a barbed-wire cage. A cat's cradle of wires was strung
across the entire site to prevent lightplanes, or angels, landing
inside this little piece of hell on earth. Guards, as well as the
10,000 prisoners who passed through the Maze, found it depressing. Up
to 50 committed suicide, Purbrick reports, some using the guns they
were issued to keep them safe from attack inside the walls.
The design of the Maze was modelled not on any Nazi German, Soviet
Russian or Ba'athist Iraqi precedent, but on US practice. Curtis &
Davis, a firm of New Orleans architects, designed the new,
prefabricated Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after one too
many riots condemned the old prison to closure in 1955. Their
pioneering work was adopted in England at Channing Wood, Devon
(1972), Deerbolt, Co Durham (1973), and Featherstone, Staffordshire
(1976), at a time when concrete prefabrication was all the rage in
the design of housing, hospitals, universities and prisons.
This was a long way from Pentonville and Dartmoor, yet the Maze was,
in its own terms, a failure. The attempt to wear down prisoners, held
without trial, in such numbingly boring conditions led to a rich
culture of resistance, the full story of which has yet to be written.
A richness of imagination made up for a poverty of place, a negation
of design and architecture.
Prisons, whether Gormenghast-like or Maze-like, are for the most part
dumb and brutal creations. There is no need to lock up the number of
people that we do. Nevertheless, as events of recent weeks have
stressed, we appear to enjoy controlling, humiliating and abusing
people we have power over. And as Wylie's images of the Maze prove,
we continue to lack the imagination to reduce the occasion for crime
and political strife.
"Donovan Wylie: the Maze" is at the Photographers' Gallery, London
WC2 (020 7831 1772) from 10 June to 1 August. The accompanying book
is published by Granta
--Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic
HELL ON EARTH--THE BACK HALF
Jonathan Glancey
Monday 31st May 2004
From the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib,
modern jails are clinical and brutal creations. Designed to disorient
and diminish inmates, the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland embodies
this architectural inhumanity.
By Jonathan Glancey
Donovan Wylie spent 100 days photographing the Maze Prison, ten miles
outside Belfast. Built by the British government in 1976, the
infamous H-block detention centre closed, after peace negotiations,
in October 2003. The buildings continue to stand while Ulster decides
what to do with this sad and dismal place. Soon enough, these miles
of barbed wire and acres of grim concrete will be razed to make way
for - who knows what? A beautiful public park, perhaps. A wildlife
sanctuary. A romantic wilderness. If past examples are anything to go
by, it will probably be reborn as some glum housing estate, a
domestic prison to replace its political predecessor.
Whatever happens to the Maze, Wylie's meticulous, obsessively focused
labour will fix for ever in our minds the numbing banality of prison
life. Whichever way his camera points, the view is all but identical.
Here, 5,000 years of architecture and urban planning have been
reduced to a faceless late 20th-century grid. Here is St John the
Divine's gridiron city, New Jerusalem, described so enticingly in the
Book of Revelations - a thing of gold, onyx and chalcedony - hammered
into a vision of purgatory. Here is a construction designed to rob
life of imagination, flatten seditious thought, steal away humanity,
put an end to time, and even to life itself.
Relentless images of gravelled alleyways set between concrete posts
and look-out towers, of single-storey concrete H-blocks and tiny
white cells, reflect the outlook of those who designed this
architectural white-out: puritanical, zealous and efficient. Parade-
square military. Hair cut. Boots polished. Coal painted white for VIP
visits. Paper clips lined in precise rows. The Maze was,
unforgettably, a place of dirty protest, of shit smeared on walls, of
sporadic violence, sudden arson, assassination, dramatic escape and
of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, starving to death
after 66 foodless days in 1981.
Looking at Wylie's photographs, it is all but impossible to sense
this underlying savagery. Modern prisons, unlike medieval dungeons or
Piranesi's Renaissance fantasies, are chaste-looking places - from
the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib. Inside
such prim walls, torture and sadistic perversions can be indulged, on
innocent and guilty alike.
Execution chambers in US prisons, designed to be as clinical as
possible, share the aesthetic of the operating theatre, or freshly
cleaned motorway service station lavatory. The perversions carried
out in such places are as sick as the crimes committed by the guilty,
as pathetic as the deaths of the innocent. Here are hells of our own
making, walled around in DIY wall tiles.
For all this tide of prison porn, one of the most frightening aspects
of contemporary jails is their unstated aim to reduce inmates to a
hollow state, to lock them up in places that have less character than
a new housing estate in the Thames Gateway. The Maze was a prison
famous throughout the world, a detention centre for loyalist and
republican politicians and gunmen. But as Wylie's pictures show, it
might almost have been anywhere. If the skies were bluer, this might
be Texas; if there was snow on the ground, it might be Russia.
These deliberately repetitive images remind me of Italo Cal-vino's
description of Trude in Invisible Cities (1972): "If on arriving at
Trude I had not read the city's name written in big letters, I would
have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken
off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the
others . . . following the same signs we swung around the same flower
beds in the same squares. Why come to Trude, I asked myself. And I
already wanted to leave. 'You can resume your flight whenever you
like,' they said to me, 'but you will arrive at another Trude,
absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole
Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the
airport changes.'"
Or it reminds me of Patrick McGoohan's rebellious character, Number
6, in the cult 1960s television series "The Prisoner". In the final
episode, No 6 breaks free of the picture-book yet nightmarish prison
village he has been held in, only to discover that he is his own
jailer and that, out of prison, he is still in it.
In Britain today, following the lead of the United States, we are
locking up an increasing number of our people, and for the most petty
of crimes. The desire is, presumably, to keep people under control,
to regiment them, to shut down their imaginations, their capacity to
rebel, if not to commit crime, by banging them up in architecture and
places as vacuous as the Maze.
In a perceptive essay in the book accompanying Wylie's photographs,
Louise Purbrick writes that one of the main purposes of the design of
the Maze was to disorient and diminish prisoners through an infinite
repetition of spaces, materials and control systems. To make the Maze
even more of a non-place, its 2.5 miles of 17ft-high walls were built
on 270 acres of low-lying bog. So even if there had been views of the
outside world, these would have been bleak and minimal. The
prefabricated buildings were as colourless as they could be, although
(a very British touch) they were hung with floral curtains.
Each building, including the chapel, was imprisoned within the
prison, in a barbed-wire cage. A cat's cradle of wires was strung
across the entire site to prevent lightplanes, or angels, landing
inside this little piece of hell on earth. Guards, as well as the
10,000 prisoners who passed through the Maze, found it depressing. Up
to 50 committed suicide, Purbrick reports, some using the guns they
were issued to keep them safe from attack inside the walls.
The design of the Maze was modelled not on any Nazi German, Soviet
Russian or Ba'athist Iraqi precedent, but on US practice. Curtis &
Davis, a firm of New Orleans architects, designed the new,
prefabricated Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after one too
many riots condemned the old prison to closure in 1955. Their
pioneering work was adopted in England at Channing Wood, Devon
(1972), Deerbolt, Co Durham (1973), and Featherstone, Staffordshire
(1976), at a time when concrete prefabrication was all the rage in
the design of housing, hospitals, universities and prisons.
This was a long way from Pentonville and Dartmoor, yet the Maze was,
in its own terms, a failure. The attempt to wear down prisoners, held
without trial, in such numbingly boring conditions led to a rich
culture of resistance, the full story of which has yet to be written.
A richness of imagination made up for a poverty of place, a negation
of design and architecture.
Prisons, whether Gormenghast-like or Maze-like, are for the most part
dumb and brutal creations. There is no need to lock up the number of
people that we do. Nevertheless, as events of recent weeks have
stressed, we appear to enjoy controlling, humiliating and abusing
people we have power over. And as Wylie's images of the Maze prove,
we continue to lack the imagination to reduce the occasion for crime
and political strife.
"Donovan Wylie: the Maze" is at the Photographers' Gallery, London
WC2 (020 7831 1772) from 10 June to 1 August. The accompanying book
is published by Granta
--Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic
