At Recess 02: Carceral Architecture

Thursday, March 12, 2026, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

The W.M. Keck Lecture Hall at SCI-Arc, 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013

Parking lot located at 350 Merrick St., Los Angeles, CA 90013

Building access via double glass doors up the ramp

Please join us for the second At Recess, an ongoing series hosted by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, celebrating books, architecture, and urban culture. Each session invites authors, editors, and designers to present their recent publications and engage in open conversation about the ideas shaping contemporary architecture and the built environment.

At Recess 02 marks the Los Angeles launch of Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls by Basile Baudez and Victoria Bergbauer (JOVIS).

Architecture is never neutral—but what makes architecture carceral? Where do spaces of incarceration materialize, and how do their spatial logics haunt contemporary society? This book brings these questions to the fore. Prisons are hidden from public view, and incarcerated people disappear behind blind walls. Questions of location, materiality, volume, sound, and circulation—standard considerations for any other building type—are rarely taught or debated in this context. Architects avoid carceral commissions, and when they accept them, seldom acknowledge it. Underfunded and left to contractors, carceral facilities in the United States remain largely absent from both architectural and public discourse. For the first time, this volume places the architecture of confinement at the center of the conversation.

Speakers:

Victoria Bergbauer
Jasmine Benyamin

About the Editors:

Basile Baudez is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His latest single-authored book, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021), was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He is co-editor of Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023), which explores the interconnections between soft and hard architecture in the longue durée from diverse geographic contexts. He regularly teaches community-engaged courses in partnership with New Jersey-based NGOs, such as the East Trenton Collaborative and the New Jersey Prison Justice Watch.

Victoria Bergbauer is a historian of modern Europe whose research explores the relationship between incarceration, architecture, and the formation of modern states. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 2025 and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Her dissertation, Fragments of Freedom, offers the first transnational history of formerly incarcerated individuals. By tracing the trajectories of adolescents after confinement, it demonstrates how prison architecture was central to emerging norms of restorative justice and to the development of modern European statehood. Her broader work examines processes of normalization in modern societies and has appeared in English, French, and Italian publications. Through the Prison Teaching Initiative, she served as a humanities tutor at East Jersey State Prison, an experience that continues to inform her commitment to critical engagement with the legacies of incarceration.

About the Speaker:

Jasmine Benyamin is Adjunct Associate Professor at the USC School of Architecture, having previously taught at CCA, Texas A&M University, SCI-Arc, and as Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP). Her interdisciplinary scholarship addresses architectural manifestations in art practice and popular culture. In addition to translating several architectural monographs, her essays have appeared in the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), Thresholds, Constructs, AD, the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Offramp, DOCOMOMO journal, LARA, the Harvard Design Magazine, and the Journal of Architecture. Her books include MASTERcrit (ORO, 2022), and a co-edited volume (with Elena Manferdini), Full Spectrum: Colour in Contemporary Architecture (London: RIBA Books, 2023).

RSVP Here

Tickets:

$15 for the general public

$5 for L.A. Forum Members

The event is also free to SCI-Arc students (student ID is required.)

This event is ADA accessible.

Parking is available on campus. Alternatively, street parking and paid lots are available. Metro A and E Line stops at Little Tokyo/Arts District are within walking distance.

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AT RECESS 02: BOOK TALK

By The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

AT RECESS 02: BOOK TALK

CARCERAL ARCHITECTURE