Camp X-Ray: The War on Terror, Memorialization, and Architecture

The Camp X-Ray site located in Guantánamo Bay United States Naval Base, Cuba, has played an essential role as a temporary detention facility to house detainees captured by the United States Army after the 9/11 (September 11, 2001) attacks on the United States soil. On January 11, 2002, the first group of 20 detainees, arrived at Camp X-Ray on a military transport plane. Later, Camp X-Ray was closed and detainees were moved to Guantánamo. Yet Camp X-Ray remains intact – untouched, because it is still a crime scene. It offers, therefore, a site with difficult histories on war, terror, incarceration, and international law. This project, “Camp X-Ray: The War on Terror, Memorialization, and Architecture”, aims to uncover these overlapping concerns by proposing ways to memorialize, in architecture, the dark reality of a prison system and treatment of detainees over the last fourteen years.