The apertures are also beveled, meaning that they cast less shade toward the inside of the building and allow more light to stream in.īuilt in 1975 and designed to accommodate a maximum of four hundred inmates, MCC Chicago currently houses 641. Seven feet in height but less than six inches in width, they are not wide enough to require bars, making the cells (in theory) feel less prisonlike from the inside. These windows are tall, thin openings that read as elegant slits in the building’s facade. The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. It also reduces the required length of internal corridors and maximizes the ratio of vertical to horizontal surface area, admitting more natural light through the windows. The triangular configuration is a straightforward move that accomplishes a lot - it sets the building back from Van Buren Street, shielding it from street noise and from the elevated trains that run along that major thoroughfare. MCC Chicago’s distinguishing features, in addition to its rooftop exercise yard, are its triangular footprint and the shape of its windows. But the Harry Weese–designed edifice is undeniably more thoughtfully devised and strikingly detailed than most publicly funded buildings today. "Invenzioni capric di carceri: The Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)," Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 153.ġ7Marchesano, “Invenzioni capric di carceri,” 151.There is a federal prison in downtown Chicago, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, that is celebrated by architects because it “doesn’t look like a prison.” That fact hardly matters to the people inside, of course - the building is still a prison. 17ġ4Lucchi, Lowe, Pavanello, The arts of Piranesi, 125.ġ5Marchesano, Louis. The prisons of I Carceri stand out as one of his major achievements. For example, in Italy, a popular representation of the sublime involved depictions of Mount Vesuvius erupting, a terrific and devastating event. The images presented by these plates would have been deeply haunting to his audience as an expression of the sublime, a style founded in the emotion of terror which was becoming fashionable in the art world. 16 In these prints, Piranesi demonstrated an investment in a unique visual experience for the viewer, evidenced by the tug of war between light and shadow. No other prints by Piranesi force the eye to move so deeply inward and upward. Piranesi’s dabbling in stage design must have also been an influence in the invention of I Carceri, as the fantasy and narrative of such architecture is omnipresent. 15 The second edition of I Carceri was inspired by his obsession with archaeology and antiquity and was influenced by the impressions he gathered in Rome. I Carceri allowed Piranesi an experimental outlet with which he ventured into his interests of scale and monumentality. Piranesi betrays the rules of perspective and even hides important elements of the architecture itself when his etched lines fade into the edges of the paper. In I Carceri, Piranesi never presents an entire building, nor does he ever give enough information to distinguish the complete form of the structures, as in The Pier with Chains. In both pieces, there is a sense of cluttered and claustrophobic space, endlessly extending structures, and impossible structures. The Man on the Rack and The Pier with Chains, representative examples of I Carceri, both contain large cavities of space and gigantic pillars, buttresses, walls, and arches. 14 These pieces represented unrealistic architectural structures that have little to do with actual prisons. In I Carceri, Piranesi explored the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. Piranesi created the series of convoluted prison interiors, I Carceri, after being influenced by his upbringing in the printmaking scene in Venice.
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