Spatialising Exception: Napier Barracks and the Carceral Architecture of Asylum in the United Kingdom Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Saif Hajazi Manchester School of Architecture Manchester | UK As the UK government moves to house asylum seekers in former military barracks, dismantling conventional accommodation strategies in favour of large-scale institutional sites, a critical question emerges that policy and legal debate has consistently failed to ask: what does the architecture of these places do to the people inside them? This dissertation takes that question as its starting point.Taking Napier Barracks in Folkestone as its subject, the research examines how a former military site converted into asylum accommodation in 2020 produced conditions of confinement, fear and psychological harm through its physical design alone. At a moment when this model is being actively scaled across the UK and across Europe, with further former military sites already earmarked for asylum use, the dissertation establishes an architectural evidence base for the conditions this typology produces, before it becomes the established model of UK asylum provision.Through the analysis of spatial layouts, material conditions and the first-hand testimonies of former residents, the dissertation traces how surveillance, regimentation and the absence of privacy operated at every scale of the site, from the perimeter fencing that provoked immediate fear on arrival, to the dormitories and isolation rooms that structured, degraded and dehumanised everyday life within.In positioning architecture as a political instrument rather than a technical solution, the research argues that the spaces we produce for the most vulnerable are not neutral responses to housing needs, but expressions of how a society values, or fails to value, those it houses within them. Tutor(s) Leandro Minuchin