Society s Cage by SmithGroup: 2020 Best of Year Winner for Design Unity
February 8, 2021
Photography by Alan Karchmer.
In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, SmithGroup principal Dayton Schroeter and associate Julian Arrington felt compelled to respond. They wanted to help Americans understand that the killings weren’t isolated events, but part of a 400-year history of systemic racism. The designers conceived of a public installation called Society s Cage, temporarily erected on the National Mall last summer, based on research into four categories: Black executions; incarceration; death by police; and death by lynching. A 15-foot cube of 484 rusted steel rods presented their findings. On each side of the structure, hanging rods of different lengths formed a simplified graph of the sobering data. “It is literally the shape of institutional racism,” Schroeter notes. Inside, the piece hollowed out into a jagged void, with rods becoming obstacles symbolic