Designed for a vacant lot between the City and the East End in London, the prison is a meaningful pause in a chaotic world and an interpretation of the formal language of the metropolis

Empty areas in the city, its voids, offer scope to the imagination of observers who can interpret them in their own way. This is comparable to reading a text where the reader's imagination is activated by the space opened up by the text, in turn enriching what is on the page.

In my analysis of the fascinating area between the City and the East End in London I discovered that the process of naming spaces and elements was a new way of making them living and tangible. The research area round the East London Railway Line is full of history whose fragmented, chaotic structure gives it a sense of the surreal.

On a vacant lot in this area - a place of emptiness, loneliness and forced detachment - the idea of a prison took shape. A regular, obsessive, enclosed structure that is at the same time open, light and transparent; an ordered composition of elements and functions generated from diversity, as in a text. It interweaves a set of functional elements and spaces in a repetitive structure strong enough to be an ambiguous in-between space, an inside without outside, as much present as infinitely far away. A prison is a silent and critical element in the city, a meaningful pause in a chaotic world. The prison is an interpretation of the formal language of the metropolis, a place where lives and stories are unfolded and reconstructed into something different and new.

Place of education: TU Delft | Specialization: architecture | Tutor: Marc Schoonderbeek