Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime explores and connects two massive expansions in our built environment. We hold 2.2 million inmates in United States prisons today, and host 2.3 million daily visits to our museums—and both statistics reflect a ten-fold increase in twenty-five years. Institutions of discipline and exhibition have replaced malls and office towers as the anchor tenants of U.S. cities. Though at polar extremes in terms of public engagement, class eligibility, and civic pride, prisons and museums are in many ways complementary structures, employing related spatial tactics to secure and array problematic citizens or priceless treasures, while orchestrating public awareness of both. Outside general discussions of  "stealth architecture" and the "Bilbao effect," little has been documented in this twinning of surveillance and spectacle within contemporary urban renewal. Corrections and Collections reports back on these newly proximate architectures for the beautiful and the damned.

Joe Day is a designer and architectural theorist in Los Angeles, where he leads Deegan-Day Design and serves on the design and history and theory faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). In addition to frequent publication of his design work, his critical writing has been featured in journals including Architecture, Interior Design, LoudPaper, Deutsche Bauzeitung, and Architecture and Urbanism in Latin America, as well as in surveys including Sessions (SCI-Arc, 2005) and Evil Paradises (New Press, 2007). He edited an AIA Award-winning monograph of Frank Israel (Rizzoli, 1992). He recently contributed a Foreword to the new edition of Reyner Banham's seminal study Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (University of California Press, 2009). In his design work and teaching, he explores the fast-evolving visual economies of privacy, surveillance, exhibition, and display. His seminars and design studios at SCI-Arc focus on the themes of exhibition, incarceration, urban studies, and the nexus of contemporary art and architecture. In addition to his current post, he has led design studios at Otis College of the Arts and the University of California, Los Angeles, touring twenty prisons and visiting over two-hundred museums over the last two decades.