Originally published on July 15, 2020, in no. 13
I worked as a substitute teacher on the last day of classes before the Covid-19 quarantine began in Minneapolis. I chose Franklin Middle School from the morning list of schools in need of substitutes. Franklin stands in a working-class Black neighborhood on the Northside of Minneapolis, two miles from the house where I grew up, just across the Mississippi River.
According to the attendance roster, only about a third of the students were present. Their teacher had left no instructions, so I gave each class a free hour to talk or play on their Chromebooks. When I wasn’t getting the aux cord set up (playing their requests) or dissuading them from chasing one another around the classroom, I talked with the students.
In the second hour, I struck up a conversation with a group of four young Black girls, all about eleven or twelve years old.
“What do you do when you’re not teaching?” one asked.
“I study architecture,” I said.
She replied matter-of-factly, “Well, that’s cool. Did you know that the architect of our school also did prisons?”
The other girls nodded earnestly in agreement.
Indeed, their school does look like a prison—a hulking mass of concrete and brick from a bygone era. But I knew it was a myth. A nasty rumor among students at schools sheltered within Brutalist buildings. I knew this because I’d heard it before at my own schools. I told these middle schoolers that my peers had said the same thing about where I got my secondary education, South High School in Minneapolis. And my classmates said the same about the main building at my undergraduate college, the North Academic Center at the City College of New York. Both educational institutions serve working-class students, a majority of whom are racial and ethnic minorities.
In each of these places of learning, the rumor of the prison architect circulates as mythic lore. It’s embedded in how young people see their built environment. Surely this inflicts trauma of some sort, encoding upon youthful minds that the state feels their bodies are a threat to be contained in prison-like buildings.
To be sure, the rumor of the prison-turned-school architect is sustained foremost by the massive shapes and hard exteriors of Brutalist design. Amber Wiley, author of the forthcoming book Concrete Solutions: Brutalism and Black Power in the Nation’s Capital, has written about the example of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., to explain how Brutalist school design often employed novel spaces for teaching, such as open-floor plans for adaptable classrooms. Franklin Middle School, my own South High in Minneapolis, and the North Academic Center in New York share much of this history. Over the course of these buildings’ use, the prison architect myth has solidified through the walling-in of the floor plans and a rising culture of criminalization known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
The Brutalist school buildings were not always welcomed by local residents, and some dissented against them from the get-go. Marta Gutman, author of the forthcoming book Just Space: Architecture, Education, and Inequality in Postwar Urban America, explains as much through the case of Intermediate School 201, a middle school in East Harlem with entirely windowless classrooms. Gutman describes how a loose coalition of working-class mothers of color gathered to denounce both the building design, perceived as ominous even then, and the school system itself, in which community input was marginal. These works by Wiley and Gutman show that new scholarship is beginning to tackle the complex relationship between race and Brutalism.
Such histories are distinct from the rather uncritical revival of Brutalism that is occurring in architecture culture today. This revisionist movement was in the back of my mind as I spoke with the young Black girls about the architecture of their middle school. From what I’ve seen in the United States and the United Kingdom, the resurgence of Brutalist appreciation is largely authored and curated by white men; precisely those whom the state has always centered. While nuanced in detail, their narratives are typically nostalgic view of the postwar social welfare state—the fruits of which the young Black girls’ forebears were not intended beneficiaries. In my classroom small talk, I could hear the dissonance between the Brutalist revivalists and the girls who believed their school was designed by a prison architect.
I heard this dissonance again in the days after George Floyd died a mile from South High School. Another half-mile past the school is the Southside police station, famously set on fire during the protests. Thinking about Floyd made me think about Jamar Clark, a young Black man also murdered by the Minneapolis police. Five years ago, Clark was shot in the head just a mile from Franklin Middle School. Black Lives Matter protesters camped outside the nearby Northside police station for almost a month during a freezing Minnesota winter.
Through caustic rumor or killer cops, Black life in the city is brutalized by white supremacy. Architecture culture must reckon with the built environment from the specificity of our embodied differences. Young minds should never have to think first of prison design when someone says they work in architecture.