In a space reduced to the extent of the human proportions, there are facilities for bathing, the disposal of excreta, and sleeping all else is superfluous. The prison cell is the ultimate realisation of the Existenzminimum sought by Modernist architects. Within the perimeter of the prison itself, they produce a microscopically subdivided space, consisting of the regular repetition of its most basic element: the cell.

Situated within the urban fabric, they admonish the citizenry with what Jacques-François Blondel called an architecture terrible when sequestered in distant rural sites (or further out in colonies) they act as cloaks of invisibility for the state’s secret human foundations.

The walls of prisons are invested with a strange kind of energy: whether implacable or erotic, they are never simply structural. The Marquis de Sade wanted to beat his brains out against them, Jean Genet was moved to kiss them. To confine, secure, rehabilitate or punish: the prison has several, sometimes contradictory aims, but however humane its approach, penal architecture is essentially cruel