Closer Apart

This project asks, "What would it mean to design a visitation environment that begins from dignity rather than control?" What does it look like to hold security requirements and human needs in the same hand, without defaulting to dehumanization as the path of least resistance? The intervention centers the visitation room as a site of resistance and care, a space where the physical environment no longer communicates punishment to the people who enter it. Material choices, spatial arrangements, lighting conditions, acoustic privacy, and furniture design are all reconsidered through the lens of what it means to maintain a relationship across one of the most institutionally enforced distances in American life.