B.A.C.K.

Beneficial Aiding Correctional Kenosis is an evidence-based reformatory practice that aims to reform the contemporary penal system itself. Although B.A.C.K is internationally practicable, it aims to act as a local catalyst by enabling a mutual interaction between the Reformation Unit and the context.

B.A.C.K aims to stimulate the ever-present bipolar social stance between punishment and reformation. Although the range of the recorded human-history exceeds 10000 years, imprisonment and reformation claim a minor part of it. Imprisonment appeared as a way of storing convicted felons prior to their execution and established through the appearance of alternative punishment and the raise of humanocentric philosophy. Prison grew to become a symbol of power, control and terror. As Foucault states in “discipline and punish” prison served not mainly as a storage for the convicted but as a symbol that dictates to the society the “right path”. Architecture itself provides answers to the wavering social stance against imprisonment with the contemporary approach in Scandinavia overturning the “just deserts” approach of the western civilizations. The neoliberal model of prison design emulating the society within prison itself, achieved an important decrease to the high re offending rates. Although B.A.C.K is universally applicable as a practice, the project proposes the first architectural “paradigm” on the southern shore of Cyprus. The proposal aims to capture the “spirit of the place” by grasping the fundamental elements that construct the context. The spatial election reflects the wilderness of the island, the dominance of the natural elements and the historic significance of production in Cyprus. B.A.C.K proposes a simplistic architectural approach combining the neo-liberal model of reformation and a forbidding monumentality that showcases with an enigmatic gesture an often forgotten piece of the society. The proposal of a highly corroded steel volume over the remnants of a long gone production encapsulates the hope towards a society discharged of corrosive traditions like prison.