Home Sweet Home

The police car slowed. The windows lowered, and an armed sun-glassed officer growls. What are you doing? Walking along the pavement. Why? The first time I had a bizarre conversation like this was in Beverly Hills. Unless you are living on the street people tend not to walk too far in Los Angeles and definitely not along the polished roads bereft of human life that run through starstruck neighbourhoods. I have a long-term interest in carceral architecture, the architecture of prisons, asylums, torture chambers, detention centres, and labour camps in which the human imagination works hard at designing ways to lock people up and inflict pain. What is so remarkable about the homes of the rich is the way they borrow from the same architectural vocabulary. High walls, razor wire, electric fences, surveillance cameras, observation posts, guard patrols, barred windows, lacerating plants, and snarling dogs. It is proof that the wealthier you become the more prone to the paranoid fear that at any moment your sanctuary will be violated by bloody-thirsty proletarians. Architectural security is big business in Brasil, and everyone wants to feel secure in their own home, but you could be easily convinced as you stroll through upper-class neighbourhoods that residents are preparing for civil war.