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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
How does architecture produce a person that is both a citizen
and a high-security felon, or that is one or the other?
Furthermore, how does architecture produce an entire society of
subjects?
To probe these questions, the project will use prisons as a lens
to explore the following architectural themes related to subject
formation: (1) sanitation, (2) observation and (3) security.
Beginning in England, the birthplace of the modern penal
institution, I will travel through France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, visiting and researching one
primary prison per country. Whether it be the Netherlandss Arnhem
Prison (one of the worlds few built panopticons), Denmarks Horsens
State Prison (an archetype of post-reform era institutions) or
Belgiums Beveren Prison (one of a group of high-tech, newly built
facilities in northern Europe), each primary prison exemplies a
particular penal typology. Visits to other prisons and museums will
provide supplemental research. (It should be noted that I have
selected only publicly accessible prisons.)
I estimate the cost of the trip, to be taken in fall 2015, to be
$9,000:
$1,350 Roundtrip airfare (New York to London and Copenhagen to
New York)$6,300 $150 per day for food, hostel lodging and local
transportation for 42 days$650 Eurail Select Pass$150 Eurostar
train London to Paris$200 Roundtrip airfare (New York to Ann
Arbor)$350 Exhibition printing and material costs
ank you kindly for your consideration. I am passionately hopeful
for this opportunity.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth J. Nichols
Date of birth: August 9, 1988Phone: (757) 810 5905Email:
[email protected]: 680 Manhattan Avenue,
Apartment 22, Brooklyn, NY 11222
1 Robin Evans, e Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison
Architecture, 17501840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 18.
Architecture as Subject-Maker: e Case of the Prison
A prisoner paints a landscape on the wall of his cell showing a
miniature train entering a tunnel. When his jailers come to get
him, he asks them politely to wait a moment, to allow me to verify
something in the little train in my picture. As usual, they started
to laugh, because they considered me to be weak-minded. I made
myself very tiny, entered into my picture and climbed into the
little train, which started moving, then disappeared into the
darkness of the tunnel. For a few seconds longer, a bit of aky
smoke could be seen coming out of the round hole. en this smoke
blew away, and with it the picture, and with the picture, my person
Gaston Bachelard, e Poetics of Space (1958) citing Hermann Hesse,
Fontaine (1945)
In 1750 Englands most infamous prison was Newgate, an
overcrowded, verminous gaol buried in the defensive walls of
London. To passersby, Newgate was discernable as a prison only for
its street-side begging grate, from which Londoners could hear the
wails of debtors and felons awaiting trial and execution.
Architecturally-speaking, Newgates facade, as well as its internal
arrangement, was indistinguishable from contemporaneous secular
buildings. One hundred years later, however, this was no longer
true for Newgate or any gaol. By 1850 reformers had
institutionalized the English prison, and it emerged as a distinct
architectural type. e new model prison was Londons machine-like,
rigorously-designed Pentonville that embodied the reformers
principles of surveillance and isolation. e begging grate of
Newgate, the space through which not only voices but goods and
capital were exchanged, was nowhere to be found at Pentonville.
Pentonvilles architecture made it as severed from the city as its
prisoners were from each other. For the rst time the role of
architecture had expanded (sometimes subtly but oen plainly) beyond
art and beyond utility to include human control.1
Signicantly, the design techniques that prisons employed then
and today are not restricted to penal institutions. Since the
nineteenth century, the methods through which architecture has
managed sanitation, observation and security in prisons have been
adopted for modern hospitals, factories, schools, housing and
planning. Yet the prison, a lowly, frequently overlooked typology,
remains the space where architecture, for better or worse, most
realizes its capacity to construct subjects, aect behaviors and
even dene morality.
I rst became interested in prisons in a studio that explored the
relationship between architecture, institutions and human
subjectivity. I believe strongly in architectures ability to make,
break or transform us as human subjects from the general (i.e. a
citizen) to the specic (i.e. a high-security felon)but how exactly
does architecture do this?
A B S T R A C T
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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
P R O P O S A L
1 H E R M A J E S T Y P R I S O N D A R T M O O R , D E V O N ,
E N G L A N D ( 1 8 1 2 )Days 0110Fly New York to LondonSee Newgate
Prison, the Clink Museum and the Tower of London and conduct
research at the British Library and the Royal Institute of British
Architects in LondonSee Her Majesty Prison Dartmoor in DevonSee
Malmaison Oxford in OxfordSee Buckingham Old Gaol in Buckingham
(time permitting)
2 L A S A N T P R I S O N , P A R I S , F R A N C E ( 1 8 6 7
)Days 1116Train London to ParisSee La Sant Prison in ParisSee the
National Museum of Prisons in Fontainebleau
3 B E V E R E N P R I S O N , B E V E R E N , B E L G I U M ( 2
0 1 3 )Days 1722Train Paris to GhentConduct research on the Maison
de Force in GhentSee Beveren Prison in Beveren (near Arnhem)
4 A R N H E M P R I S O N , A R N H E M , T H E N E T H E R L A
N D S ( 1 8 8 6 )Days 2329Train Antwerp to Arnhem (or Breda)See
Breda Prison in Breda (time permitting) See Arnhem Prison in
Arnhem/AntwerpSee Haarlem Prison and the Bijlmerbajes prison
complex in Amsterdam
5 S T A S I P R I S O N , B E R L I N , G E R M A N Y ( 1 9 3 9
)Days 3036Train Arnhem (or Amsterdam) to BerlinSee Stasi Prison and
the Moabit Prison Historical Park in BerlinSee JVA Fuhlsbuettel
prison complex in Hamburg
6 H O R S E N S S T A T E P R I S O N , H O R S E N S , D E N M
A R K ( 1 8 5 3 )Days 3742Train Berlin (or Hamburg) to HorsensSee
Horsens State Prison and the East Jutland State Prison in Horsens
Fly Copenhagen to New York
1
3
5
2
4
6
In addition to a travel blog, the research will take two forms:
a small-format publication and large-format drawings. While there
does exist survey texts on the history of prisons, such as Johnston
Normans Forms of Constraints (2003), there is no accessible,
graphically-rich publication that allows one to compare penal
institutions across time and space in architectural terms. is is
partly because the work of documenting prisons falls to
photographers and journalists. erefore, I would like to publish
(online and in print) the research of the six prisons in a format
similar to WORKacs 49 Cities (2009) with original text, drawings,
diagrams and photographs. With the publication as a foundation, the
large-format drawings will be a means to examine architecture and
subject formation through unconstrained, unsystematic means.
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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
P O R T F O L I O | S T I T C H I N G A R C H I T E C T U R
E
C R I T I C Jason YoungY E A R 20132014 P R O J E C T M.Arch
thesis exploring architectural representation in the context of
todays post-natural blend of man, nature and machine (continues on
the following two pages).
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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
P O R T F O L I O | S T I T C H I N G A R C H I T E C T U R E (
C O N T . )
Medieval Christian ideology posited man and nature as a single
entity under the umbrella of God. Today in the Anthropocene, we
will see a return to oneness and an erasure of the longstanding
perspective of dualism established during the Renaissance. Today as
smartphones extend our bodies, man, nature and machine will again
be conceived of as a single entity (now under the umbrella of
post-nature). e project explores architectural representation in
the context of todays merging of man, nature and machine. It is a
post-natural gardenscape with a set of architectural
characters...
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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
P O R T F O L I O | S T I T C H I N G A R C H I T E C T U R E (
C O N T . )
... e gardenscape functions to produce human subjectivities that
are both animalistic (subjective) and machinic (objective). A
blurring of animalism and machinism is achieved by both the
architecture of the imagined spaces and the techniques used to
represent those spaces. Each drawing couples perspective
(subjective) drawing with plan and section (objective) drawing. ere
is no site plan. Rather, the drawings relate to one another through
the architectural characters. Human subjects barely occupy the
imaged spaces; they are as unsure of their place in the gardenscape
as we are in the Anthropocene today.
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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
P O R T F O L I O | S E L E C T E D M O D E L S
Y E A R 20112014 P R O J E C T S Selected models completed while
at Taubman College. Clockwise from upper le : Villa Mller visitor
center, scale 1:50; staircase, scale 1:10; leather and suede wall
pocket, scale 1:1; 3D-printed scale gures; facade study, scale
1:300; pool installation diagram; walled maze, scale 1:500;
theater, scale 1:50; Water ief Housing massing, scale 1:1000;
facade study, scale 1:300; prison concept model, scale 1:100; PETG
vacuum form study; pool installation (with collaborator Peter
Halquist), scale 1:100.
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E L I Z A B E T H N I C H O L SG E O R G E G . B O O T H T R A V
E L I N G F E L L O W S H I P
E X P E R I E N C E
REX Architecture Junior Architect. New York, NY, September
2014PresentNecklace Residence. Lloyd Harbor, NY
Leong Leong Architecture Architectural Intern. New York, NY,
August 2014Competition for the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Los
Angeles, CA
Lee and Macgillivray Architecture StudioDesigner. Ann Arbor, MI,
November 2013January 2014Competition for the 2014 MoMA PS1 Young
Architects Program. Long Island City, NY
Adams + Gilpin Design StudioDesigner. Ann Arbor, MI, MayAugust
2013Plum Market Cart Corral. Ann Arbor, MIUnderstanding the Role of
the Built Environment for Mobility through Technology, University
of Michigan MCubed Grant, Ann Arbor, MI
MILLIGRAM-oceCuratorial Assistant. Ann Arbor, MI, MarchApril
2013Rights of Way: Mobility and the City at the Boston Society of
Architects, Boston, MA
Studio Daniel LibeskindArchitectural Intern. New York, NY,
JuneJuly 2012Redevelopment masterplan for Archipelago 21. Yongsan
Business Distric, Seoul, KoreaCentury Spire. Manila, PhilippinesL
Tower. Toronto, Canada
Habitat for Humanity InternationalBuilder. Phnom Phen, Cambodia
and Chiang Mai, ailand, AprilMay 2011
Sun Chang SchoolsEnglish Language Teacher. Gwangju, Korea, July
2010February 2011
Smithsonian Institution ArchivesBook Conservation Intern.
Washington, DC, JuneAugust 2007 and 2008
E D U C A T I O N
University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and
Urban PlanningM.Arch. with Distinction. Ann Arbor, MI,
20112014Taubman College Merit Scholarship. 20132014Linn and Grace
Smith Memorial Scholarship. 20122013Architecture + Adaptation
Research Travel Studio. Jakarta, Indonesia, 2012
Vanderbilt UniversityB.A. History of Art. Nashville, TN,
20062010Frances and John Downing Research Travel Award. London,
England, 2009Harvard University, Career Discovery Program.
Cambridge, MA, 2009University of Auckland, Study Abroad Program.
Auckland, New Zealand, 2008
T E A C H I N G
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban PlanningArch 323
History of Architecture. Instructor for Assoc. Prof. A. Herscher.
2014
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban PlanningArch 589 Site
Operations. Instructor for Assoc. Prof. G. n. 2013
P U B L I C A T I O N S A N D E X H I B I T I O N S
Contributor. Menteng by D. de Cespedes and E. Nichols in
Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation, eds. A. Bobbette, M. Miller and
E. Turpin. 2013Featured work, exhibition designer. Futures of
Hypercomplexity: Bangkok and Jakarta, Taubman Gallery. Ann Arbor,
MI, 2013Contributor. Jakarta: Design Research and the Futures of
Hypercomplexity by A. Bobbette, M. Miller and E. Turpin in MONU 17:
New Urbanisms. 2012Featured work. Navigating the Postnatural, Salt
+ Cedar Gallery. Detroit, MI, 2012Featured work, exhibition
designer. Cities of Hypercomplexity: Bangkok and Jakarta, Center
for Southeast Asian Studies. Ann Arbor, MI, 2012Editor. Dimensions
25, eds. R. Chhabra, N. Mattson, E. Kutil, E. Nichols and S.
Scharrer (received the Center for Architecture Foundations Douglas
Haskell Award for Student Journals, Honorable Mention).
2012Featured work. Taubman College Student Show, CMYK Gallery. Ann
Arbor, MI, 2012 (received Second Place), 2013 and 2014
C U R R I C U L U M V I T A E
