The Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center by Harry Weese is an intriguing typological study, a prison taking the form of a downtown skyscraper.
Weese has taken the concept of a vertical prison and developed it with a striking triangular plan allowing a centrally located guardpost a view of the individual cells on three sides, and a pixelated facade pattern of narrow window slots (as opposed to the oppressive metal bars in the typical prison building).
According to Ian Baldwin from designobserver.com:
“At the other end of what might be called Weese’s period of brutalist sympathies is a skyscraper as pure as any by Mies. The Metropolitan Correctional Center uses one of Weese’s favorite plan geometries, a right triangle, and extrudes it 28 stories. The facade is irregularly perforated with slit windows (5 inches wide by 7 ½ feet long) marking inmates’ cells, creating a perforated monolith. A homage evoking “La Tourette on its end,” [8] the lobby proudly displays Corbusian stairs and pilotis.
If the Weese vs. Mies opposition is to be believed, this would seem Weese’s clearest rebuttal: triangular instead of square, loadbearing concrete instead of steel frame, perforated openings instead of curtain wall, prisoners exercising on the roof instead of corporate titans lunching in the Four Seasons. The tower’s triangular footprint, shunted to the far side of the site, opens up a plaza originally planted with trees (which would now be a mature green canopy had the Bureau of Prisons not cut them down). Pedestrians can cut diagonally across without ever confronting the building head-on, a contrast to the Miesian practice of making the base a stage.”
