"The analogy between natural and architectural forms sometimes catches us unaware leaving profound yet fleeting impressions."1
Research and Quotes
- "Inspired by the beauty of the plant world, man has searched from antiguity to the present for ways of preserving and enjoying this beauty beyond its season. Efforts to retain and to imitate the loveliness of the flower, the gracefulness of the leaf, and the architecture of the fruit have been continual and expanding."2
"The individual “petals” of pine cones can be painted and fashioned into colorful wheels, triangles, and other geometric forms."3
"A drab-looking cluster of pods surrounded by withered leaves and residing in a field of unsightly weeds can often be transformed into a thing of beauty merely by the manner of its display. Against a new background, joined by appropriate accessories, and perhaps clothed in a different color, it may assume an unbelievable richness and interest."4
After reading this book during the first project, I found myself strangely drawn to pinecones. From here, I was able to incorporate the pinecone as the outer structure for the Outer-Space-Pinecone-Prison.
- "Pelican Bay's SHU often is
referred to as a "super-max" prison. It was designed to ensure the maximum
protection for inmates and staff. Most
inmates are in single cells. Heavy, perforated cell doors limit an inmate's ability to
assault others, without obstructing visibility into or out of a cell. Bunks to are molded
into the wall and toilets have no removable parts that could be used to make weapons . All
clothing, bedding and personal effects are x-rayed before being placed in a cell. There
are eight individual cells in each pod. A shower is located on each floor. Several
overhead skylights flood each pod with natural light. Each pod has its own 26' by 10'
exercise yard.
The Pelican Bay prison's layout is very similar to the structure of the Pinecone Prison.
Inside the Pinecone Prison, prisoners are put into their own cells. There are
four cells in each pod or quarter section of the housing floor. No prisoners will
ever come into contact with another prisoner because all of the cell doors are linked up
to a computer system allowing only one door to open at a time. This allows a
prisoner to leave their cell at a designated time to walk around the Walk About Path as
well as shower in the central shower room. This shower room is in the same place the
control room was in Pelican Bay. This is because the Pinecone Prison is controlled
from outside the cells by computer and video surveillance.
- "There is both theoretical and experimental evidence that artificial gravity can substitute for natural gravity to maintain health in orbit. In the early days of space flight, experts assumed that space stations would incorporate artificial gravity. Romantic images of life in orbit have often envisioned space habitats as graceful rotating structures. The novelty of artificial gravity may be one of the features, along with easy access to weightlessness, that attracts people to space tourism."6
The Pinecone Prison will be launched from Earth and proceed to orbit around the Earth while rotating to simulate artificial gravity. Technology in the future will continue to improve as well as technology of artificial gravity. In order for the Pinecone Prison to remain functionable, it must meet artificial gravity standards to ensure the safety of the prisoners and staff.
- "In 1998, NASA accepted a Proposal from Beoing Reusable Space Systems for a U.S. propulsion module. The following top level requirements were established at the beginning of the program. Provide reboost and attitude control capability. Provide up to 50 percent of total on-orbit space station propulsion needs. Provide 12-year on-orbit life. Maintain orbiter compatibility and transfer capability (pressurized transfer tunnel for crew and supplies). Provide the capability to be launched and returned by the shuttle. Conform to NASA safety provisions.' (Space Station. Inadequate Planning and Design Led to Propulsion Module Project Failure."7
The Pinecone Prison will have to meet certain requirements like these before proceeding to full prison functionality in orbit. A must for the Pinecone Prison is the "pressurized transfer tunnel for crew and supplies." This will allow for a constant supply of food and medical supplies from other space stations to the Pinecone Prison as well as changing staff from time to time and transferring a prisoner who has finished their sentence or a prisoner who requires extreme medical aid which cannot be solved from aboard the Pinecone Prison.
- "The Separate System originated in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street jail, opened in 1790, and is sometimes called the Philadelphia or Pennsylvania system. The regime was one of solitary confinement and manual labor, a simple monastic existence in which the prisoners were kept separate from one another as well as from the outside world. Advocates have thought that absolute seperation of the criminals can alone protect them from mutual pollution, and they have adopted the principle of seperation in all its rigor. According to the system, the convict, once thrown into his cell, remains there without interruption, until the expiration of his punishment. He is separated from the whole world; and the penitentiaries, full of malefators like himself, but every one of them eniterly isolated, do not present to him even a society in the prison. If it is true that in establishments of this nature, all evil originates from the intercourse of the prisoners among themselves, we are obliged to acknowledge that nowhere is this vice avoided with greater safety than at Philadelphia, where the prisoners find themselves utterly unable to communicate with each other; and it is incontestable that this perfect islation secures the prisoner from all fatal contamination."8
This formed a model for the solitary confinement aspect of the Pinecone Prison. Minus the manual labor of the Seperate System, the Pinecone Prison plays out this System by ensuring that prisoners never come into contact with other prisoners. Even when a prisoner is out of their cell to walk around or take a shower, they can no way communicate with other prisoners because each cell is sound proof. The absense of communication between prisoners alleviates any chance at a social environment within the prison much like that of the Seperate System.
- "Prisons today are, in the main, more limited and limiting, crowded and controlling, and finally, isolated and isolating. Modern technology allows us to reduce the number of staff and to deploy existing staff in roles that limit – and sometimes eliminate – social interaction with prisoners."9
The Pinecone Prison's computer system control of all cells elimates social interaction with prisoners as well as reduces the number of staff needed for operation.
- "We don’t have prisons that are so impersonal that they are run entirely by computers. But the impetus of technology, particularly when linked to a profit motive, suggests that prisons may become more cold and mechanical in coming years."10
The Pinecone Prison is a step towards more "cold and mechanical" prisons because it is run almost entirely by computers, which helps the overall operation of the prison as well as serving as a deterrent for people who don't want to be held in such an environment.
- "The penitentiary was the first truly modern prison. It was the template or model from which most if not all subsequent prisons were cast. In the most general sense, the Penitentiary was meant to be the perfect prison – a separate, self-contained, pure moral universe dedicated to the reclamation of wayward men and women. It would isolate criminals from a corrupt and corrupting world; and it would reshape their characters through the imposition of a strict routine of solitude, work, and worship."11
A strict routine of solitude acts as a model for the Pinecone Prison. However, routine work and worship is not incorporated into this prison system.
- “The order of one day is that of a whole year. Thus, one hour of the convict follows with overwhelming uniformity the other, from the moment of entry into the prison to the expiration of punishment.”12
Depicts the routineness of the Pinecone Prison.
- "With the passing of the disciplined and controlling routines of penitentiaries and Big Houses, today’s prisons are marked by more inmate violence than at any time aince the advent of the penitentiary. This is most apparent in men’s prisons. Prison uprisings, though not on the scale of the infamous Attica and Santa Fe riots, occur disturbing regularity in men’s prisons. So, too, are inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff violence more common today than was the case in earlier prisons."13
There is no inmate-on-inmate contact within the Pinecone Prison and there is only rare inmate-on-staff contact (extreme medical conditions where a prisoner must be taken from the Cell Housing Floor). This ultimately eliminates prison uprisings and prison violence within the Pinecone Prison.
- "Confinement represents, and has always represented, a statement by society that the prisoner is no longer a person to be trusted or respected to move freely among his or her fellow citizens."14
Each prisoner has been brought to the Pinecone Prison because they are a threat to humankind. They no longer have the right to move freely among their fellow citizens or other prisoners.
- “The cardinal sin, the one thing you were never, ever to do, was lose your keys. A lost key could fall into inmates’ hands. A lost key was a disaster.” Open the cell at the wrong time, and you – or an inmate or fellow officers – may be violently attacked."15
Every cell in the Pinecone Prison is run by computers which does not allow for more than one cell to be open at a time, therefore, the problem with lost keys is no longer a factor.
- "Solitary confinement is used in many ways in prison systems: to house those who are sentenced to death; to punish those who break prison rules; to limit the risk of harm to vulnerable prisoners; to limit the influence of individual prisoners; and to manage prison systems."16
The Pinecone Prison's solitary confinement aspect allows for a routine and systematic structure that keeps the prison running smoothly.
- "In many prisons today, prisoners live in constant fear of being assaulted physically or sexually by other prisoners. These assaults often occur as a result of prison officials’ failure to classify prisoners properly or by line officer’s failure to take corrective action when they become aware of assaults or assault risks within the prison. In other words, they are the result of either institutional conditions that prison officials have not adequately tried to remedy or of the failure to isolate prisoners who are obvious potential victims."17
Another example of how solitary confinement and provented inmate-on-inmate contact solves violent and sexual assualt.
- "Failure to protect prisoners from violence by guards or other prisoners is an inevitable consequence of overcrowding, understaffing and underfunding."18
- "Incarceration prevents crime, but for the most part only through incapacitation. Deterrence, the notion that an individual will weigh the benefits of a crime against the possibility and severity of punishment and make a rational choice, requires rationality on the part of those one wishes to deter."19
Once people on Earth gain knowledge of the Pinecone Prison and its solitary confinement, hopefully this will deter criminals who act similarily to those held in the Pinecone Prison.
- "Legislatures have long been making judgments of seriousness in the maximum penalties they set. The prescribed maxima in criminal codes usually are scaled according to the legislature’s sense of the gravity of the offenses involved, with murder and other heinous crimes carrying the greatest maximum penalties, and petty larcenies and other minor infractions the least."20
People who are ultimately chosen for imprisonment have acted out the most seriousness of crimes. Each prisoner will undergo a government investigation on the seriousness of their act and if their act is serious enough, they will be sent to the Outer-Space-Pinecone-Prison.
- "Plants that grow in axis to gravity constitute an essential part of nature’s pattern. Without the play of vertical against horizontal, there can be no experience of three-dimensional space."21
"Wright grew to believe that materials were gifts from nature to human sensibilities, which themselves were gifts of nature. He wanted to “make friends with matter,” as Emerson phrased it, to penetrate the character of each material and identify its essence. Through an intense sympathy with the nature of matter, he hoped, man could triumph over the superstition that separated him from its spirit. If architecture returned to a primative sympathy for matter, it could expand and elevate the discourse between nature and man’s use of its materials. Then the materials chosen for a building would go far toward suggesting its appropriate mass, outlines and proportions. When its strengths were understood and its limitations accepted, a material proved friendly, as if in gratitude for the recognition of its individuality. The architect who revealed the poetic nature of his materials offered an equivalence to the ever fresh and various textures of nature. The vivid expression of any material gave it inherently ornamental value."22
"Nothing was more difficult to attain than the spontaneous simplicity of nature, that sense of inevitableness typical of living things. When we perceive something as beautiful, Wright said, it is because we recognize its rightness and have been given a glimpse of the fiber of our own nature."23
This book gave me inspiration in designing the outer structure of the Pinecone Prison in FormZ.
"Why is it, we still have to ask, that the physical world of our own making is characterized by the geometrics of architecture and ordered settlement patterns while the natural world around us presents itself to us as an enigma of visual complexity? Or is it really so enigmatic for us? We learn to predict the seasons and see order in the heavens and give names to plants, places, and creatures. Perhaps, as previously suggested, our world is actually a reflection of the natural one after all. It is just that the order of nature manifests itself in combination of human intellect and our observation of nature; but nonetheless it is an abstraction-one that we do not easily recognize because it is so implicit in our own nature."24
More inspiration for designing the Pinecone Structure in FormZ.
1. Paolo Portoghesi, Nature and Architecture (New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 2000), 9.
2. Leonard Karel, Dried Grasses, Grains, Gourds, Pods and Cones, (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press Inc, 1975), 1.
3. Karel, 14.
4. Karel, 14.
5. Security Housing Unit: Pelican Bay. < http://www.cdc.state.ca.us/program/house2.htm>.
6. Space Future: Artificial Gravity and the Architecture of Orbital Habitats. <
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/artificial_gravity_and_the_architecture_of_orbital_habitats.shtml>.7. Space Station. Inadequate Planning and Design Led to Propulsion Module Project Failure. <http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=gao&docid=f:d01633.pdf > (June 2001).
8. Robert Johnson, Hard Time: Understanding and Reforming the Prison (Belmont, California: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2002),37.
9. Johnson, xiii.
10. Johnson, xiii.
11. Johnson, 32.
12. Johnson, 38.
13. Johnson, 53.
14. Johnson, 64.
15. Johnson, 211.
16. John Kleinig and Margaret Smith, Discretion, Community, and Correctional Ethics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 142.
17. Kleinig and Smith, 194.
18. Kleinig and Smith, 19.
19. Kleinig and Smith, 153.
20. Andrew Von Hirsch, Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments (New York: Hill and Wang Inc, 1976), 13.
21. Donald Hoffman, Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Nature (New York: General Publishing, 1986), 22.
22. Hoffman, 27.
23. Hoffman, 40.
24. Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995), 33.