Architecture of oppression : slave fortresses and their relevance to contemporary American urban prison architecture

Abstract

No discussion on architecture and race would be complete without a look at the slave fortresses of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The importation of African slaves to the Americas was the economic catalyst that subsequently catapulted America in a world superpower, and questionably into imperial leadership. Speckled along the coast of West Africa, the architecture of the slave trade is as monumental and systematically oppressive as the institution it sustained. Due to the rise in prison privatization and the common practice of leasing prison labor to corporations while paying the offenders a menial fee, the American prison industry is operating more and more like slave fortresses. Spatially, the spaces are particularly similar in the areas of exterior formal qualities and parallel evolution of urban planning.