Art Installations

Tricia Stuth & Ted Shelton: Point / Counterpoint: A Conversation with Haviland

Located in Cellblock 10, Point / Counterpoint addresses the prison’s underlying concept and influential role as an architectural type – the radial prison.  If architecture can be seen as a humanistic discourse carried on between various practitioners over time, it is usually a conversation that is carried on indirectly and only through inference.  The opportunity to interject a counterpoint into an architect’s line of reasoning is a rare opportunity to speak directly and without equivocation – not in the hope of negating the original idea, but in letting each idea resonate according to its own merits.

Architect John Haviland’s (1792-1852) scheme for Eastern State Penitentiary, while certainly a technological marvel of its day and a bold social experiment, can be read as an attempt to control view and through this manipulation alternately empower or isolate the prison’s various occupants.  In a cell, the prisoner’s view is limited in every direction – held in by the opaque walls.  The only visual outlet afforded here is the single oculus, directing the prisoner’s gaze toward God if it is to be free at all.  Even in the adjacent exercise yard, the prisoner is deprived of a horizon and allowed only a clipped slice of the sky.  In the early days of the prison, this visual deprivation was heightened to the extreme, with prisoners being hooded on the rare occasions when they were moved around the facility – denying them even a mental picture of the compound and their place within it.

Conversely, the guard’s view, while still specifically controlled, is extended and enhanced.  Patrolling the long corridors flooded with natural light the guard is privy to a world that is completely hidden from the prisoner.  His gaze is charged with control and power.   At the central rotunda, this elevation of the power of view is lifted to its logical apex.  Here, the guard becomes all seeing – able to monitor all corridors from a single point.  So central is this idea to the concept of the prison, that when the radial plan was broken with the addition of cellblocks eight and nine the guard’s view was bent and extended along these new paths by way of large mirrors.

Point /Counterpoint proposes – in a specific location and for a limited time – to turn the tables.  Through an intervention of screens and scrims, mirrors and thresholds, the view of the guard will be captured and contained within a cell; while the prisoner’s view will be extended and linked, not only to that of other prisoners, but ultimately to an implied “horizon” brought in through the oculus.

Ted Shelton and Tricia Stuth teach at the University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design.  As partners of CURB they also work collaboratively on projects that strive to heighten our understanding of place.  Ted received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee, his Master of Architecture from University of Oklahoma, and his Master of Philosophy in Environmental Design from Cambridge University.  Tricia received her Bachelor of Science and Master of Architecture from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

Additional funding for this installation was provided by the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; University of Tennessee Exhibit, Performance and Publication Expenses Fund; Adam Mize and Joan Monaco.

Photo © Frank Iaquinta/Halkin Photography