Date of Submission
Spring 5-12-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Architecture
Department
Architecture
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Jade Yang
Abstract
This thesis operates at the intersection of
architectural memory, spatial justice, and speculative
futurity. It asks not only how buildings harm, but how
the ground they occupy can be reclaimed — not
erased, but transformed. Rather than demolishing
the evidence of detention, the project proposes a
descent: a subterranean sanctuary that borrows the
geometry of confinement and inverts its intention,
turning surveillance corridors into processional
thresholds, cell dimensions into the measure of
sacred space, and the enforced stillness of detention
into a choreography of ritual and rest.
The site is Webb County Detention Center, Rio
Bravo, Laredo, Texas — a facility that sits at the edge
of the Rio Grande, facing west toward Mexico,
embedded within a community whose cultural, famil-
ial, and spiritual life has long exceeded the borders
imposed upon it. The project is set in 2075, fifty years
after the facility's decommissioning and community
reclamation, when the wound of the site is neither
fresh nor forgotten — when the architecture of
reckoning becomes both possible and necessary.
The sanctuary does not perform healing. It creates
the conditions for it — through compression and
release, darkness and light, the weight of rubble
recast as altar, and the slow procession toward a
horizon that was always there, just underground.