As Angela Y. Davis has proposed, the “path to prison,” which so disproportionately affects communities of color, is most acutely guided by the conditions of daily life. Architecture, then, as fundamental to shaping these conditions of civil existence, must be interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to expand the ways the built environment’s relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture. The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in the United States—and follow the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present one must shift the epistemological frame elsewhere: to places, discourses, and narratives assumed to be outside of the sphere of incarceration. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality offers not a fixed or inexorable account of how things are but rather a set of starting points and methodologies for reevaluating the architecture of carceral society and for undoing it altogether.

Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt is a designer, writer, and editor. She currently leads Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, and is a contributing editor of the Avery Review.

Amale Andraos is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and cofounder of WORKac, a thirty-five-person architectural firm based in New York that focuses on architectural projects that reinvent the relationship between urban and natural environments. Andraos has taught at numerous universities including the Princeton University’s School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania Design School, and the American University in Beirut. Her publications include the recent WORKac: We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge (Monacelli Press, 2017); 49 Cities (Inventory Press, 2016); Above the Pavement, the Farm! (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); and The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016).

Columbia University is one of the world's most important centers of research and at the same time a distinctive and distinguished learning environment for undergraduates and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields. The University recognizes the importance of its location in New York City and seeks to link its research and teaching to the vast resources of a great metropolis. It seeks to attract a diverse and international faculty and student body, to support research and teaching on global issues, and to create academic relationships with many countries and regions. It expects all areas of the university to advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world. Founded 1754.