Ricerc@Sapienza

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.