Architecture of Authority

A California prison's communal room is among Richard Ross's empty spaces. (By Richard Ross)

We have posted on this amazing book, "Architecture of Authority," by Richard Ross, last year. It is a sometimes shocking book. It provides images of spaces most of us would never see. Also, Ross questions the complicity of architects in designing some of these "dehumanizing" environments. Pictured are institutional spaces, interrogation rooms, holding cells and isolation booths , as well as high schools, DMV waiting rooms, hospitals. The breadth of images provides a compelling insight into how we "warehouse" people who must be controlled.

The reason we are posting about this book again is that an exhibition of 44 of these large format images from the book are on display at the National Building Museum in DC. Ross's images are "captured with a spare geometric beauty that is as compelling as it is disturbing," says the Washington Post architectural critic, Phillip Kennicott, in his vivid, challenging and excellent review of the images in this exhibition.

Architecture of Authority

Metropolitan Police, Holding Room, London

This book, The Architecture of Authority, by photographer, Richard Ross, has been exploding around the design world for a few months now. It is such a powerful book that we thought we would like to memorialize it here for our readers. Just in case you missed it.

With photographs ranging from the United Nations Assembly Hall to the segregation chambers at Guantanamo, Cuba, we see, in the words of a Los Angeles Times reviewer, "...stripped down hard-edged rooms designed to facilitate systems rather then individuals, places where power is exercised and suffered." Ross' work forces the viewer to ask serious questions about the dark side of architecture.