Spazi e relazioni dimenticate: la non-architettura del carcere / Forgotten Spaces and Relations: The Non-Architecture of The Prison

In a 1983 interview, a journalist of the Italian newspaper La Nazione asked the architect Giovanni Michelucci: “How would you build a prison?” He replied: I wouldn’t build it. I would have it done by someone else. […] Unless I were allowed to build a whole city”. Italy’s prison-space has been the subject of debates within architecture, and these debates have been shaped by the country’s political events in the 1970s and until the late 1980s. In 2000, the Penitentiary System Regulation was passed, aiming to reform the system and define measures concerning the curtailment of liberty within prisons. This was followed in 2001 by a call for projects for medium-security prison prototypes. Subsequently, the Plan of prisons, issued in 2010, was supposed to initiate a series of interventions to improve prison conditions both in terms of solving the condition of overcrowding and setting up detention models aimed at creating real rehabilitation opportunities. In 2013 however, the European Court condemned Italy for breaching article n. 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Italian Penitentiary system is still experiencing a crisis, causing hardship among prisoners and others. This article analyses updated materials from a research published in 2018 and discusses the absence of architecture in the prison space. Against this backdrop, the article argues for a shift in the approach to such space: from being merely an object of functional design to one dense of meaning and in need for a holistic rethinking.