It is a
commonplace that architecture reflects daily habits of people according to the
channels and obstacles by which it regulates movement and exchange. I would
like to turn that commonplace around and formulate a question to end with: What
happens when architecture becomes the only vehicle for physical security? When
the fear of violence has changed domestic habit and subsequently changed the
architecture enclosing that domesticity, how does the resulting architecture
then begin to affect society? Surely it will provide security at the expense of
the very life it tries to secure? I would like to end with an apocryphal but
widely circulated conversation reported between a prisoner and an Uptown
visitor: Prisoner: I am better off than
you are. Visitor: How so?
Prisoner: I shall be out of my cage in
just three years. (This story was told me by David Harrison)