5th Year Architecture Students recently installed an exhibition titled “Reconstructing Incarceration” at MAINSITE Contemporary Art Gallery. The exhibition presented the students’ work from the special topics studio taught by Prof. Marjorie Callahan and Dr. Keith Gaddie. Explore the virtual tour of the exhibition below.
The exhibition and the students’ work “aims to create design solutions to the defects we found in the current jail system we have today in America.” Using the Oklahoma County Jail as a case study, the student redesigned every aspect of the jail focusing on the themes of “autonomy among detainees, a building modeled after mixed-use development, and community involvement.”
The exhibit was split into five main parts: Master Plan, Cottage Design, Exterior Spaces, Gathering, and Jail Tech. Visitors to the exhibit could explore the students’ designs, and in many portions, they were able to interact with the exhibit in order to understand the principles of incarceration that the students chose to focus on, including deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, and rehabilitation. The students previously traveled to Washington DC earlier this semester to present their project to the State Department.
Learn more about the Reconstructing Incarceration project at the OU Daily, NPR StateImpact Oklahoma, and News9.
View photos from the exhibition in the gallery below.
Telesis, a journal produced by students in the University of Oklahoma Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, has earned first place in the 2026 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals for its seventh volume, “Unfold.” This marks the fourth time the publication has earned recognition for excellence in student architectural journalism. It shares the honor with student journals from Columbia University, University of Michigan, and Cal Poly.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture congratulates Thinh "Henry" Duong, a master's student in the Division of Interior Design, for earning first place in the 2026 Robert Bruce Thompson Annual Student Light Fixture Design Competition.
Gibbs College of Architecture Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) Director and Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture, and Design (PLAD) faculty member Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., recently published a new book, Collective Yearning: Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum.
