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Top-level
@jonny Furthermore, this particular campus was designed as a series of chokepoints in the wake of 1960s student uprisings. Its campus design highlights how much of the last 60+ years of American built space is a physical apparatus for the police state & social control. 18 comments
@Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny Not just campus design, the whole US built environment. Every modern suburban neighborhood is designed for limited ways in & out and to virtually require car ownership to access anything. “Urban renewal” projects bulldozed neighborhoods where protesting residents could block off a street and have multiple escape routes for highways and buildings like these campuses.  @PedestrianError @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny And they built elevated freeways through many of those neighborhoods so the military could deploy through and above them, and control the high ground in riot situations. Every aspect of American society is about control. @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny This is an interesting take on the elevated highways. I've always heard it described as White suburban commuters having no respect for the now Black neighborhoods they fled decades earlier.  @ryanrandall @zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny It's struck me how most workplaces I've been in are designed as fortresses, with walls and controlled points of entry with guards. And somewhere I read an article about how the "corporate campus" was designed to isolate workers, so they don't leave the work site even for meals. @foolishowl @ryanrandall @zagone @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny This is one reason why workplace mapping is an important part of union organizing @sidereal @ryanrandall @zagone @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny I've usually kept an eye out for where people could reach workers with leaflets and such outside the gaze of corporate security. The trick to organizing workers inside is to have a means of communication outside. @foolishowl @ryanrandall @zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny  @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny a friend of mine attends purchase rn and she told me it was literally like designed by a prison architect??? which actually doesn't surprise me lmfao @tonicfunk @ryanrandall @jonny I think that's incorrect. The architect behind the master campus plan was Edward Larrabee Barnes who certainly did some judiciary buildings, but no prisons as far as I can tell... @Theblueone @tonicfunk @ryanrandall @jonny There is a lot more to a campus than architecture @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny Fellow alum here. It was also constructed in such a way that it could easily be converted into a prison if the school should, you know, fail. They've done a lot to beautify it in the years since I graduated, which is crazy. I wanted that ugly modernist nonsense forever. @ryanrandall @jonny if it’s so untenable as a defensive position, why not spill the protest out into the streets?  @cobaltrose  @ryanrandall @jonny That's ... interesting. Because the Japanese campus from which I retired a couple of years ago (Nagoya University) had a central quad with planters arranged with exactly that aim, and in response to Vietnam war protests. (They're no ripping it up for a new building.) OTOH the earlier protests lead to an agreement with the police that they would not enter campus grounds. Unlikely to hold if there were serious protests, but still important symbolism. |
Gregory's Server
@ryanrandall @jonny Yeah, I did undergrad at SUNY Purchase which was built in the 70s. The entire campus architecture was built around not allowing the students to seize buildings and creating choke points for students and access points for large groups of riot cops